“... were not actually born to succeed. King George V was 27 before the death of his elder brother, the Duke of Clarence, put him directly in line to the throne. King George VI was 41 when Edward VIII unexpectedly abdicated. And Queen Elizabeth II spent her first decade with no inkling that she might one day be called upon to reign. Taken together, these examples ...”

“... 1500, Pole was a Plantagenet, with a claim to the English throne. Both his grandfather, George, Duke of Clarence, and his uncle, Edward, Earl of Warwick, had been attainted and executed for treason; the latter, the Plantagenet heir, had been shut up soon after the Tudor victory at Bosworth and imprisoned by Henry VII for most of his short life. Henry VIII ...”

“... pastoral refuge from the cares and brutal competition of society, as the Forest of Arden does for Duke Senior and his exiled companions in As You Like It: there they can ‘fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world’. Indeed in his Treatise and Discourse of the Lawes of the Forrest (1598), the fittingly named John Manwood playfully suggests ...”

“... of Derry, whose mistresses and profane talk made the English colony shun him; Henry Cardinal, Duke of York, brother to Charles Edward, at 78 ‘still uncommonly handsome, with the freshness of youth in his cheeks’; and finally the Pope, whose toe Margaret and Katherine were all agog to kiss, when he ‘by a motion of ...”

“... roadshow organised by Shaftesbury and Buckingham around the King’s bastard son, James, Duke of Monmouth, was playing to rapturous crowds. Activists among the country gentry, incensed by the long prorogation of Parliament in 1675, and by then convinced that Charles II would never accept Parliament as a partner in government, had for some years ...”

“... head of suffrage marches, and carried himself with such distinction that he was called the Grand Duke. To top it all, when I read his diary I discovered he was passionately and very problematically in love with his best friend’s wife. I knew little about his artist son, Richard – C.R.W. Nevinson – apart from his First World War paintings and ...”

“... previous months thanks to the death of his eldest son, Arthur, and his beloved wife, Elizabeth of York. It was imperative that he establish his family properly among the club of European royalty. Arthur’s death had disrupted Henry’s coup in acquiring a daughter-in-law from the Trastámara dynasty of Aragon-Catalonia-Castile: Princess Margaret’s ...”

“... Crisis of 1679, the attempt to exclude Charles II’s Roman Catholic heir presumptive, James, Duke of York, from the throne. In the political dramas of the 1680s the Russell dynasty produced two of the iconic figures of English Whig mythology: the Whig martyr William, Lord Russell, and one of the Immortal Seven who in ...”

“... to know any No voters, but I keep asking people what they think the final outcome will be. In the Duke of York, where there used to be a portrait of my early hero Ralph Bossence, an old schoolfriend, Maxy, whom I remember playing in a pipe-band as part of Paisley’s first election campaign for Belfast City Council, says he ...”

“... context and to providing brief sketches of its members. Prominent inhabitants of a central New York town called Eastridge, the Talberts live in a big house with a mansard roof in the outdated ‘taste of 1875’ and derive their income from the Plated-Ware Works, where Mr Talbert – ‘materially the first man of the place’ – has worked his way up ...”

“... service to the Russians, he apparently possessed knowledge, documented by Costello, of how the Duke of Windsor had compromised himself with the Nazis. It was his insurance that he would never have had to flee to Moscow, under whose crude rigours the fastidious Blunt would surely have quickly buckled. The traffic was not all one way, however. Read The Storm ...”

“... provided the bulk of the clients, seeking the glamour given to safari by such celebrities as the Duke and Duchess of York (1925), the Prince of Wales (1928 and 1930) and Hemingway (1934). Porters were made redundant by the motor-car, so that even the pseudo-feudal contact with Africans sustained in the old days was ...”

“... the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, the phonejack-in-the-sky of the AT–T Building in New York) gave plausibility to the promotional prose. AT–T was the work of Philip Johnson, the friend of Andy Warhol, and so the publicity came with a background story ready to hand. The Post-Modern would be the art-historical movement that went beyond art by ...”

“... agent Rosalind Chatto to tell her that when in last year’s LRB diary I quote an old lady in New York as saying ‘I zigged when I should have zagged’ the original remark came from the American sports reporter Red Butler, who reported it as having been said by Randolph Turpin after his defeat by Sugar Ray Robinson. How my old lady came to know this is a ...”

“... book, Darcy could raise only 260 fighting men to confront the many thousand Pilgrims now occupying York. Without help from further afield Darcy had little choice but to surrender Pontefract, and thereafter, from perhaps a mixture of motives, to work with rather than against the Pilgrims. This, at least, is Hoyle’s opinion, which is not universally ...”