“... has gone on to normalise the extreme aberration in a way that recalls the passive compliance of King Victor Emmanuel III in 1922 and Field Marshal Hindenburg in 1933. Yet it is the ‘resistance’ warriors in the popular culture who have gone furthest to take political confrontation to a perilous edge. Robert De Niro led a cheer of ‘Fuck Trump’ at the ...”

“... to expose the relationship.In one respect Murray’s account is less informative than David King Dunaway’s in Huxley in Hollywood (1989). Dunaway, unlike Murray, spoke to Rosalind Bruce Huxley, Leonard’s second wife. Even after seventy years, her recollection was brutal: ‘The girl was village educated in a mild way. It couldn’t have worked. His ...”

“... indirect commodity taxes on domestically-produced goods. Like some economic historians such as Peter Mathias and Patrick O’Brien, Brewer suggests that the taxes may well have been heavier in Britain than in many other European states, and may also have fallen disproportionately hard on the middling and lower classes, rather than the landed and rich. Plus ...”

“... campaign. Stray stories keep emerging about Charles XII and the Northern War; ultimately the King is defeated at Pultava and heads for exile at Bender. Here, for once, Bond’s exemplary touch fails him, when he annotates: ‘Charles XII fled south to Bender (modern Tighina, in Bessarabia).’ This information appears to derive from about the tenth or ...”

“... careers of pupils, who included Aldous Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Peter Fleming, John Bayley – a literary macédoine to which several other ingredients could be added. As it fell out, I had myself no dealings with Lyttelton at school, knowing him only by sight. He had the air of being young for his age, a tall, apparently ...”

“... of 14-year-old schoolboys, so fantastically improbable does its success still appear. It required Peter Taylor, a burly, buzz-cut ex-marine, to convince Japanese immigration officials that he was in Osaka to perform with the violinist Taro Hakase. It featured a wad of $10,000 yen tied in a hairband to ‘tip’ a departure gate official in Osaka. And it ...”

“... certainly fed into Schoenberg’s next major work, the oratorio Gurrelieder, a setting of Jens Peter Jacobsen’s tale of the Danish king Waldemar’s love for his mistress Tove. In November 1901, Schoenberg moved to Berlin to take up the post of musical director at the Buntes Theatre, one of the city’s most ...”

“... with the party among the Catholics which renounced sedition. Yet the tensions between loyalty to king and country on one hand and his Catholic faith and friendships on the other took acute practical forms at a time of grave national emergency. The discovery of the plot was a turning point in his life and in his art. He quickly distanced himself from the ...”

“... Brown’s sonorously essential Collected Poems, and the first of his works to be set to music by Peter Maxwell Davies, with whom Brown worked closely in developing the St Magnus arts festival on Orkney. The 14 individually titled couplets of this poem set out, as Fergusson notices, ‘the 14 stations of Christ’s Passion and death reflected in the cycle of ...”

“... become the ‘moloch of the species’, as J.H. Kellogg, the American health reformer and cereal king, described it in the typically apocalyptic rhetoric of anti-onanists. Female masturbators, previously sidelined, acquired new prominence, and the prevention of infantile masturbation became a Europe-wide obsession. French doctors performed genital surgery on ...”

“... help of the European powers, which later provided a Bavarian teenager as the country’s first king (the Greek parliament sits in what was his palace); Greece’s first political parties were aligned with English, Russian and French interests. After the Second World War, the US ensured that Greece wouldn’t fall under Soviet influence by enlisting it as a ...”

“... as an agent in the mid-1950s, representing the interests of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Joseph Cotten and many lesser lights in the studio firmament. Those of us who knew Clancy – he died in July 2017 in Los Angeles at the age of ninety – can attest that he was a tummler of note, a real-life Zelig who found himself with ...”

“... damage.Back in London, the Week was reaching its peak of notoriety. Improbably, it joined the king’s camp against the government during the 1936 abdication crisis: Cockburn detested Stanley Baldwin and the establishment even more than the monarchy. By printing what the rest of the world was already reading, the Week became indispensable during the ...”

“... Giroux that the feelings in the poems ‘do not represent the feelings of an active homosexual’; Peter Levi that ‘homosexual love was to Elizabethans inevitably chaste.’ Pull the other one, Peter. No one watching Marlowe’s Edward II could have felt for one moment that the relationship between Edward and Gaveston was ...”

“... The war​ rescued my father, Peter Raban, from his first job as a probationary teacher in the West Midlands and restored him to his proper station as an officer and a gentleman. He had hoped to go on to university (Oxford or Cambridge) from his boarding school in Worcester but his dismal Higher School Certificate results nixed that ambition ...”