“... at the Caroline Court. This was John Churchill, toy boy of the Duchess of Cleveland, one of Charles II’s discarded mistresses. Churchill, too, was treading a familiar trail: his elder sister was the Duke of York’s concubine. They married secretly, against the wishes of both families, and enjoyed a lifetime of connubial happiness, sustained by ...”

“... my interpretation is right, the appearing of the Lord cannot overpass the year 1881.’ The hope that he might be among the chosen, that he need never taste death, was to remain with him for the rest of his life. Still traumatised by his experiences in Alabama, he was immediately attracted by the radical egalitarianism of the Hackney Brethren. He broke ...”

“... being ruled by the Mamluk sultan and his officers. Bartolomeu Diaz had rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, and in the decades that followed the Portuguese threatened Muslim control of the Red Sea and sought to blockade Egypt’s spice trade. But Leo never mentions this, any more than he mentions the absence of printed books in Africa, or the impact of ...”

“... intolerable, unstoppable and, in war at least, indispensable. He was bred to it. His father, Sir Charles Jackson, was a Monmouthshire architect-developer, lawyer and politician who, among other things, built up a large collection of silver which virtually is the National Museum of Wales’s collection and bought shares in a then obscure Sunday newspaper ...”

“... of individual sportsmen too. Sport seems to license people to behave badly in a way they could not hope to get away with in normal life.Horspool takes us through the weird variety of sports practised by the British, from the medieval tournament and the Turf to golf and the Empire Games, scoring all round the wicket with the grace and economy of a Hammond or a ...”

“... her biographer, Mrs Gaskell (shocking irresponsibility about proven facts in both cases), while Charles Reade was given a particularly severe wigging for his novel It Is Never Too Late to Mend. This tale was, admittedly, based on an actual legal case, but not closely enough for Fitzjames’s taste. ‘We have taken the trouble of comparing this novel ...”

“... Morning Post, after a Private Eye of the time. She took as her second husband the rogue politician Charles Townshend, who seems to have married her for money and influence, and to have gone in fear of her female will. According to J. Steven Watson’s Preface – one of two excellent introductory pieces, the other being by the editor of the volume ...”

“... flush out the devout, the fluent genuflection before entering the pew the first indicator. Charles Moore sinks to his knees straightaway and prays for a considerable period of time, and Piers Paul Read similarly. Some admiration for this, men who pray in public not uncourageous, though more often met with at Catholic rather than Anglican services. The ...”

“... cameras. When we reached Trafalgar Square I noticed an EU flag tied to the equestrian statue of Charles I. Passing down Whitehall, just after Banqueting House, where Charles had his head cut off, removal vans could be seen parked outside 10 Downing Street. In Parliament Square, the Hare Krishnas were dishing out free ...”

“... of the group. In August 1876, when he was 21, he wrote to William Ward about their contemporary Charles Todd, later chaplain to the Royal Navy: ‘In our friend Todd’s ethical barometer, at what height is his moral quicksilver? Last night I strolled into the theatre about ten o’clock and to my surprise saw Todd and young Ward the quire boy in a private ...”

“... performed by John Banks’s splendidly over-the-top costume drama The Island Queens (banned under Charles II in 1684, rewritten and rehabilitated under Anne as The Albion Queens, 1704), during which Mary and her victorious antitype Elizabeth enjoy the first of their many apocryphal but irresistibly dramatic meetings, this one a dreamlike and overwrought ...”

“... Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of Charles Lamb (the ‘gentle-hearted’) – but the broad allusion did pretty much what was wanted, assuring the theoretically advanced that they were now top dogs. Condescension usually has an anxious motive. Eliot, as Tom Paulin is on hand to say, was working ...”

“... bit. And a wee so-slight poem like Gigha will let people see “he really can write poetry” (I hope). It is a pity and sad that it really works this way.’ Graham’s next book, The Nightfishing (1955), was demanding in a new way; the title poem was some five hundred lines long. But at the same time, Graham had loosened the texture of his poetry and ...”

“... of the king and queen. At that point, it was not only the radicals who were still exclaiming with Charles James Fox that the Revolution was the greatest and the best event that ever happened to the world. Pitt himself had declared a few months earlier that ‘the present convulsions of France must, sooner or later, terminate in general harmony … thus ...”

“... the Royal Lodge in Windsor. It also shows in his account of meeting the Queen. A letter to Prince Charles is signed ‘Your loyal and humble servant Ted Hughes’. In a heartfelt letter to Nick Gammage (15 December 1992), he claims that the monarchy has ‘deep psychological significance for the union’. He took attacks on the monarchy personally, and of ...”