“... waned but he saw out five of Henry’s queens and any number of ministers and favourites. In Mary Rose, his book about Brandon’s third wife, David Loades says: ‘He was present everywhere, but it is hard to pinpoint what he actually did.’ Throughout his career Charles accumulated grand-sounding titles, which confused outsiders into overestimating his ...”

“... read. That Pope adapted a line from Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, when he wrote ‘Die of a rose in aromatic pain’ (Essay on Man) is constantly referred to in footnotes, but editors and critics have generally fought shy of considering the impact on Pope and other poets of his time of Finch’s work as a whole. The work of the women poets became ...”

“... Surprised by the support for legalising cannabis in her 1995 Barking Youth Survey, the Labour MP Margaret Hodge concluded: ‘this almost certainly represents a generation gap.’ The chasm between Conservative thought and public opinion is epitomised by Penny Mordant, in charge of the Young Conservative and Unionist Association. It’s difficult to imagine ...”

“... several Orientals, people who could have been Mexicans. The drums were struck, a small chant rose to the sky, and they began marching alongside the highway. They were as ragged, as obscure, as devout and self-involved, as some medieval band on an old woodcut. One might have imagined them marching from village to village, between heathlands or cultivated ...”

“... a ‘milky circle’. She has come to Almería with her mother to seek a last hope treatment for Rose’s leg paralysis (she calls her mother by her name) at the Gómez Clinic. Eleven years ago her father left them in London and returned to Greece. He had a religious conversion, inherited a vast shipping fortune just as the euro was collapsing, and married a ...”

“... me with the machinery of my investigation and informed me of the name of my natural mother – Margaret Walsh – which my adoptive mother had only ever hazarded or garbled. But after a few days in the Family Records Centre in London, it was clear that there’d be work to do: the number of Margaret Walshes qualifying as ...”

“... carsinto the forensic flash, flash of cameras.Around her, the Pre-Raphaelite beautiesof Julia Margaret Cameron,the mongols of Arbus.Track east to the Caltonwhere Nelson’s upturned telescopestands staring at the ground,where the observatory lies empty, closeda century ago by railway smokefrom Waverley: the Enlightenment below.Gulls mill like ash around ...”

“... in an evening gown, her hands full of red petals, looking more like Shelley’s beloved heaping rose leaves on the bed. If only it were Fuseli’s Lady Macbeth seizing the bloody daggers (his Titania and Bottom would have made a wonderful tableau vivant for a window to0). Gareth Pugh’s Sycorax is the nearest to spectacle, dressed in a stiff funnel-necked ...”

“... mothers – like Mary O’Meara – living in booming late Victorian towns. Working-class incomes rose in the 19th century – and yet, in turn, women’s and children’s vulnerability increased. Griffin’s most striking finding is that once the subsistence crises of the first half of the century were overcome, urban children were much more likely to suffer ...”

“... no longer identified with the road to hell, or even to disgrace. Gone are the days when Princess Margaret was denied the right to marry the husband of her choice, merely because he was ‘a divorced man’, thanks to the breakdown of a previous marriage which had nothing to do with her. Today the Princess undertakes her share of royal functions with all her ...”

“... in his own life between the working-class boy from Hebden Bridge and the glory to which he rose: ‘He spoke of his miner father coughing up his pneumoconiosis in the next bedroom to himself at home and of the 18 constituents who had died when their cage crashed in carnage to the bottom of Markham shaft the previous August. We were of an age and we ...”

“... such as Faber (Lefevre d’Etaples) or Girard Roussel, the favourite preacher and bishop of Margaret of Navarre, who was prepared to protect controversial religious thinkers, or a Lutheran court poet such as Clément Marot, from persecutions approved of by her beloved brother King Francis I. Why did Erasmus, despite it all, not break with Rome? Who was ...”

“... the great-granddaughter of Henry VII; her paternal grandmother was Henry VIII’s older sister, Margaret Tudor. While most of Europe thought of Elizabeth as a bastard – how could a daughter of Anne Boleyn be otherwise? – Mary was as legitimate as they come. Henry VIII had removed Elizabeth from the line of succession, and only an Act of Parliament had ...”

“... particularly telling Romantic variant on The Recess, the anonymous novelette published in 1820 as Rose Douglas, or, The Court of Elizabeth, An Interesting Historical Tale, Detailing the Life and Singular Adventures of Rose Douglas, the lovely daughter of Mary Queen of Scots: Her Interview with Queen Elizabeth, and residence ...”

“... Paul Ferdonnet and André Olbrecht, who recorded programmes in Stuttgart; in the States, ‘Tokyo Rose’, Mildred Gillars (‘Axis Sally’) and Ezra Pound, who was indicted for broadcasting from Italy; in Britain, John Amery and P.G. Wodehouse, who was cold-shouldered for giving a jaunty talk about life in his internment camp. Lord Haw-Haw was the most ...”