“... water-proof: so I have to walk about in it, having nothing else.’ Then, on 27 November 1912, to Charles Gifford: ‘You will be grieved and shocked to hear Emma died this morning shortly after nine o’clock.’ There follow, besides the usual replies to condolences, a glimpse or two of the squalor of domestic unhappiness: ‘I am getting through E.’s ...”

“... neighbour Uvedale Price, Sir William Hamilton, Britain’s ambassador at Naples, and the collector Charles Townley. By the mid-l780s Knight moved in the liberal, not to say liberated Whig circles that had Charles James Fox as a hero, and ancient Athens as an inspiration. Knight’s first literary attempt was to describe a ...”

“... Elizabeth, equally determined in her way, had to bypass a number of unattractive facts. The king was a martinet on bad terms with all of his sons and the straitlaced, almost literally unbending Queen Mary a formidable mother-in-law, yet neither stood a chance against her flood tide of affection. Other references in the letters make it clear that she ...”

“... Home Rule party and its leader, John Redmond. Ever since Parnell had been hailed ‘the uncrowned king of Ireland’ in the 1880s, the majority of nationalists had supported the parliamentary campaign for Home Rule, hoping that Westminster could be persuaded or cajoled into devolving government. Though Gladstone’s bills of 1886 and 1893 had failed – the ...”

“... be confused in the same way. On the verge of publishing Madoc in 1804, he announces to his friend Charles Wynn: ‘You do not know, said Horne Tooke, how proud a man feels when he is to be hung upon a charge of high treason. – You do not know how consequential a man feels when he is about to send a quarto volume into the world.’ Only two years ...”

“... We think now of Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone, but the pattern can be traced back to King John, when London sneaked its own municipal charter under the lee of the barons, and even before. From almost the start, the dominance of Roman London in the affairs of Britain was a surprise, and shakily defined. But the climax came in the 17th century, in ...”

“... Napoleon Bonaparte and his chief diplomat, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, are usually seen as the oddest of history’s odd couples. One personified boldness, ambition and overblown operatic passion; the other, subtlety, irony and world-weary cynicism. One displayed such restless physical energy that contemporaries repeatedly reached for that newly hatched adjective ‘electric’ to describe him; the other was sickly, pallid and had a club foot ...”

“... aesthetic peccadillos. He is traced mainly through his lengthy projects as Surveyor-General of the King’s Works, the chief office he held from 1669 until his late, peremptory dismissal at the age of 86 in 1718. Thus the biography sometimes turns into a catalogue of building designs, from university commissions such as Trinity College Library to the host of ...”

“... breaking out of its familiar four walls and beginning to move (quite literally, if we think of Charles-François Daubigny’s floating workspace on the river). Some studios, like Moreau’s, sloughed off any pretence of domesticity and achieved cavernous proportions. At the 1937 Paris World Fair, where the European dictatorships faced off against one ...”

“... by the career of Martin Beckman, a Swedish mercenary tasked with arranging fireworks for Charles II’s coronation in 1661; he held the post of royal fire master for the next forty years. Unfazed by confessional differences, Beckman put on great shows that lightened the royal coffers and set fire to Londoners and their homes – even after 1666, when ...”

“... Szakall.Before Auden came on the scene Chester had taken the fancy of a New York financier, Robert King (‘not his real name’). King duly enrolled as a patient with Dr Kallman, and after a little bridgework had broken the ice, invited the dentist to supper at the Astor Roof. There was presumably some routine orthodontic ...”

“... celebrations last year for another milestone of Stuart English prose composition, the King James Bible, and although I was surprised by the large amount of public interest shown in that commemoration, I doubt whether the Prayer Book will have such an impact. Many will regard it simply as a tribal occasion for a particular Christian ...”

“... about the capacity of style to preserve dead subject-matter. Discussing journalism in his essay ‘Charles Whibley’, he writes: ‘literary style is sometimes assigned almost magical properties, or is credited with being a mysterious preservative for subject-matter which no longer interests. This is far from being absolutely true. Style alone cannot ...”

“... was left blank in his journal. ‘A damn’d unhappy part of the World,’ his second-in-command, Charles Clerke, reported, ‘just as destitute as a Country can be.’ To take possession of such a place was a waste of time and energy – ‘an essential loss’, he called it – and to chart it was ‘nothing but a trifling point of geography’. The ...”

“... went for the laugh. Jackie said it in a thoughtful, reflective way; he showed the side that made Charles a great king afterwards.’ A year later MacGowran made his London debut as the Young Covey in The Plough and the Stars, becoming friends with its author, Sean O’Casey. In 1956 in London he played – to much critical ...”