“... hair curiously similar to that of Farrah Fawcett-Majors, backed by astrology charts and holding a King Charles spaniel. One just has a drum-kit that says Blondie on it and a guitar like a horse’s neck, with veins. Harry says she had noticed in her own drawings and paintings ‘some subtle reference to my own face when I was drawing someone else. I have ...”

“... can get away with this debate as to who precisely, as between him and the future King of England, is whose dog, because the Henry IV plays give him peculiar authority. This is an authority that works not only inside the plays but outside them as well. One of the few early stories, rare but trustworthy, that come straight from Shakespeare’s ...”

“... of rural festivities, reflecting the protracted propaganda campaign on their behalf by James I and Charles I. Marcus is open to the attractiveness of the carnival sprit, which had its own radical generosity, setting aside traditional hierarchies and roles in the name of a less individualised sense of humanity. But by the 17th century, when her story ...”

“... also in self-deception. Owners of social houses aspired to make them powerhouses, to entertain the King and members of the Cabinet. But insofar as high politics remained a country-house pursuit, it was still carried on in the homes of the Derbys, Devonshires and Salisburys, who despised ‘middle-class monsters’ – be they buildings or businessmen. The ...”

“... of the ‘rules of war’, and that James II lacked legitimacy because he was no longer legal King of England. He was surely a king to the Irish who fought at the Boyne, and for that reason a threat, not only to the religious unity of the Williamite settlement, but to its whole territorial integrity. The early 18th ...”

“... in the grass behind his dugout. He arrived in France as a willing, if not eager, officer of the king. By autumn, however, he understood that the death that had overtaken a steady stream of his comrades was highly likely to come to him too. In one pathetic note to my grandfather, at that time a popular playwright, he asked him to try to use his influence to ...”

“... and illustrated by artists – beginning with the trio of William Morris, Burne-Jones and Charles Fairfax Murray, who helped launch the work after some friends came across it in a remainders box outside Quaritch’s. Two years had passed since the bookseller first published it, at the price of 1s, and not a single copy, it seems, had been sold. That ...”

“... internalised version of the mother. We can’t be sure of the effect of the lost mother on the king penguin, but we can be in no doubt that it matters greatly to England’s royal family. In his essay ‘The Place of the Monarchy’, Winnicott helps us gain traction on the problem: ‘It is in the personal inner psychic reality that the thing is ...”

“... banishment of straight lines and symmetry was much applauded). The most striking example of all is Charles Cressent, whom Scott does not mention at all, the daring novelties and extraordinary beauties of whose furniture and clockcases have been plausibly credited to the fact that the patronage of the Regent enabled him to ignore the guild regulations that kept ...”

“... that tale is over and the Rev. Dr Rabelais thinks of real men in real wars, a ‘tyrant’ such as Charles V, who ransomed the King of France, is condemned and the once-comic figures who egged Picrochole on are treated as ‘seditious’ (a sin as well as a crime) and made to toil in the printing-presses; the wounded are ...”

“... on the railways. No, 350,000 German soldiers, said Colonel Driscoll DSO, working as moles. The King spoke of his nephew the Kaiser planning to land an army corps and proclaim that, as a grandson of Queen Victoria, he was ready to free the King from ‘the Socialistic gang which is ruining the country’; Parliament voted ...”

“... published in November 1790, before the September Massacres and the Terror and the execution of the king and queen. At that point, it was not only the radicals who were still exclaiming with Charles James Fox that the Revolution was the greatest and the best event that ever happened to the world. Pitt himself had declared a ...”

“... a brushed steel buckle. He’d met Charlie, but this was his first look at the truck. ‘Hello Charles,’ he said to Charlie, then remarked: ‘I like the shotgun rack.’ ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It’s also good for keeping umbrellas.’ He stared. ‘No, man. Umbrellas? What kind of wuss-ass keeps umbrellas in his shotgun rack?’ Before I could answer ...”

“... it was full of stacking chairs. It was a depressing, institutional, impersonal sight. I thought, Charles must see this all the time. Glance sideways, into the wings, and you see the tacky preparations for the triumphant public event. You see your beautiful suit deconstructed, the tailor’s chalk lines, the unsecured seams. You see that your life is a ...”

“... village schoolmaster, was no snob. But it seems that she did not really like cricket, or beer, or Charles Lamb, or – after a very brief marital idyll – Blunden himself. She declined to accompany him to Japan, for which he set out in 1924 to take up a teaching post at Tokyo University. Although his students soon began to like and appreciate him, he was ...”