“... book reads like a series of postcards home, complete with snaps: Self with the Queen, Self with Prince Charles, Kenyatta, Chairman Hua, Lee Kuan Yew, Self receiving life-membership of the NUT (some gift!), Self receiving honorary doctorate, Self in state robes. The great events of history alternate, paragraph by cosy paragraph, with the great events of his ...”

“... of Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess (1624) depicts, with scandalous specificity, King James, Prince Charles, the Duke of Buckingham, King Philip of Spain, Count Gondomar, the Bishop of Spalatro and others. Again, Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl (1611) depicts that very particular individual Mary Frith, aka Moll Cutpurse. Whatever ideas ...”

“... enough’ word-use is harder to resign myself to, though just as necessary, I suppose. Remember Prince Charles: ‘Whatever “in love” means’? I never thought to compare myself to HRH, but he is, among other things, a bit of a nit-picker and miserablist, and we do have that in common. Gretchen Rubin (a name that hints at a fairy-tale ending) is ...”

“... not commit to writing,’ he adds in 1923. Thanks to the zeal of the gutter press we know that Prince Charles wanted to be a tampon; Lloyd George, in the summer of 1918, wanted to be a cold: ‘I have been envying that cold & wishing I were it. In the dead of night I should have crept down to the lips & had a great time – pressing their softness & then ...”

“... dancers to have come through the school in recent years, has described a visit to White Lodge by Prince Charles while she was a pupil there, during which security dogs, nosing around in advance of the royal party, sniffed out her stash of forbidden chocolate. But there are other stories. Classical dance is fixated on youth, on yet to be fulfilled promise; it ...”

“... mannequin in the Bill Clinton or Felipe González mould – or even a mixture of Billy Graham and Prince Charles. Initially, he seemed prepared to give Blair a chance, comparing him favourably with Keir Hardie – a Benn family hero whose biography Caroline wrote in 1992. But once Blair began to include Lloyd George in the Labour Party’s radical ...”

“... know from polls that a majority of Australians will not choose to see their sovereignty reside in Prince Charles’? Only if the whingeing latte-sippers and culture-heads get their act together for another push against the system. Penal colonisation has given way to ‘independent’ self-colonisation. Keneally points out that the 1999 referendum on the ...”

“... for Buckingham, is his ‘risky and peculiar’ trip to Spain in 1623 with James’s son and heir, Prince Charles. James was persuaded to let his ‘sweet babies’ travel incognito to Madrid as Tom and Jack Smith, to bring home the Infanta Maria as Charles’s bride. It was a match that James and the count of Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, had been ...”

“... in French), and much about the comings and goings of Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, Roy Jenkins, Prince Charles and the like – plenty of material here for a comparative study of the discourteous and the bibulous, with suggestions of an inverse correlation between the two. At one point in Henderson’s career, however, the role of ambassador acquired ...”

“... events that have been sold to Rupert Murdoch, or on organising the kind of party that would drive Prince Charles to despair, then so be it. You cannot treat people like idiots while claiming to act in their best interests, unless complete idiots is what you take them to be. There is no justification for a national lottery like the one we have ...”

“... a Royal Knock Out, a new generation of Windsors has taken over where their forebears left off. Prince Charles devotes himself to rather idiosyncratic and unfocused inner-city initiatives. Princess Anne has transformed her public image by her work for the Save the Children Fund. And for a time it seemed as though the Princess of Wales was going to revive ...”

“... of his Sunday Mirror story telling how the future Princess of Wales was supposed to have met Prince Charles secretly in the royal train in a country siding. It was denied outright by Buckingham Palace, but the editor refused to retract. Jokingly, or perhaps not, he suggests this may have cost him a knighthood. If an editor can be knighted for editing ...”

“... by Sir Henry Marten of Eton. Time for a change? Lady Longford gives us to understand that Prince Charles is an expert on the subject, as he probably needs be in self-defence; it is to be hoped that he has supplemented these studies by meditation on the appropriate bits of Blackstone. Mercifully, however, royal personages are dependent on books for ...”

“... not for doing’, she has decided to allow the world to know all that she has to put up with. Prince Charles is a cad – he walks away when she flings herself head-first down the stairs, he mocks her when he finds her reading Jungian texts on death and holding the hands of dying friends, he is petulant about her popularity with the population. Worst of ...”

“... mourning or the funeral: not merely the lack of restraint but the fact that both Earl Spencer and Prince Charles crossed themselves – an act which would have brought the monarchy down a generation ago. I doubt, however, that this is as new as it appears: the Mid-Victorians, for instance, would have found it all much more familiar than we do. My guess is ...”