“... with Chamberlain, Beatrice Webb and Milner) conspire with the Duc de Mersch (King Leopold of the Belgians) to ‘civilise’ Greenland’s Eskimos. The protagonist of the novel, Arthur Granger, is an aristocratic and unsuccessful novelist who betrays his own cherished chivalric ideals for the sake of a girl-agent from the Fourth ...”

“... haunt his college and his stories, along with the ghosts of Queen Victoria, George V, Mackenzie King and the Devil himself). He noticed that Oxford was haunted by that eerie scholar, Montague Summers, who dressed like a Mediterranean priest but was always accompanied on his afternoon walks ‘either by a pallid youth dressed in black, who was supposed to be ...”

“... God had declared himself: he and his ceremonies would not be mocked. (And, incidentally, the King and the bishops were right and their Parliamentary critics proved wrong.) By 1642 ritual acts were more controversial than ever. English parishioners had long been used to ministers who rejected traditional ceremonies, but some now endured a clergy which ...”

“... scandal, but it was acting in the national interest. Johnson’s real hero, however, is Richard Nixon, an embodiment of all that is best in the American character. By contrast, John Kennedy was a spoiled rich kid without principles or convictions, who thought he was above the law and ran around with glamorous women. Why, then, was Nixon’s ...”

“... opinion polls. If you are fated to be Osric, then count yourself lucky to toil for a weak and vain king. During the course of his breath-catchingly trite and boring inaugural speech this past January, the President came to a line which reeked of midnight oil. He bore down on it, emphasised it, enunciated it with portent and paused after it for ...”

“... for Change would not be implemented until the lessons of the war had been analysed. However, Tom King, then the Secretary of State for Defence, had already promised to give the outline to Parliament before it broke up for the summer recess, and we still live with the consequences. The ‘coalition of the willing’ that came together to achieve the removal ...”

“... first initial and surname: six Wolfs, three Weills (not just Kurt), two Wollheims (neither of them Richard, who was born in England). Celebrated figures such as Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, who went to Turkey, are mentioned only very briefly. Exile was a great leveller – and also a dealer of death. Much of the 20th century has been commemorated in the ...”

“... thought is made helpfully explicit by the artistic director of the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Richard Monette, who contacted Nolen soon after the story broke, expressing a desire to adopt the Sanders as the Canadian Stratford’s own official portrait of Shakespeare, to be retitled ‘Shakespeare in the New World’.Part of the appeal of the Sanders ...”

“... questions that they askd was, when it would thunder. Joseph Banks, The ‘Endeavour’ Journal Richard Holmes describes The Age of Wonder as a ‘relay race of scientific stories’ about the explosion of exploration and scientific achievement in England between two celebrated voyages, Captain James Cook’s first circumnavigation of the world in the ...”

“... that these ‘docu-dramas’ are a new phenomenon, a modern hybrid. Those with long memories cite Richard Brooks’s 1967 film In Cold Blood as a prototype. Based on Truman Capote’s account of a quadruple murder in rural Kansas, the film was shot in vérité black and white and used the actual locations where the killings took place. But the true crime ...”

“... be manipulated ‘as a convenience for the rich and powerful to save themselves from criticism’. Richard Ingrams, then editor of Private Eye, suggested that, since he felt so strongly, Waugh might stand for Parliament himself. It’s possible Ingrams was joking, but Waugh took up the suggestion and ran in Thorpe’s North Devon constituency for the Dog ...”

“... aunt, he Lady Diana’s publisher. On the maternal side, Sybil Cooper was descended directly from King William IV through his mistress Mrs Jordan, in her day a celebrated actress. It is not, I think, altogether illusory to see, in this infusion of blood, cause for Hart-Davis’s own inclination towards the stage and traces of the Sailor ...”

“... identity he used to wear a white rose on the anniversary of the Battle of Bosworth, in memory of Richard III, whom he regarded as the last English – because Plantagenet – king. Coincidentally, Shapiro quotes from a popular postwar textbook, The Plantagenets, in which John Hooper Harvey states that the Jews engaged in a ...”

“... took an interest in literary criticism, history and philosophy as well as society gossip. Richard Steele, the magazine’s editor and a friend of Swift’s, puffed the poet and his work in an introduction. This new writer, he said, deserved to be read and admired because he had ‘run into a Way perfectly new, and describ’d Things exactly as they ...”

“... cable, including Thomas Karamessines, deputy director of the clandestine wing of the CIA; J.C. King, chief of the clandestine wing’s Western Hemisphere Division; and William Hood, at that time chief of operations under King. Roman said she didn’t know why the 10 October cable made no mention of the FBI reports, but ...”