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“... was to make lists of celebrities unhappily transfixed in this way by the force of circumstance. Charles Féré, for example, wrote in 1892, citing B.A. Morel: ‘Who has not heard,’ says Morel, ‘of the febrile fits which were produced in the savant Erasmus at the sight of a plate of lentils? . . . King James II ...”

“... series of eye-problems, partly the effects of undiagnosed porphyria, which eventually left the king blind. He was fascinated by the stage, and in the 1780s became drama critic for the Morning Post. He cultivated the friendship of actors, dramatists, theatre managers, with extraordinary assiduity; indeed, over a period of more than forty years he seems to ...”

“... the Thatcher government like Douglas Hurd and William Waldegrave as well as her private secretary Charles Powell, and the late Yehudi Avner, who was Israel’s ambassador in London between 1983 and 1988. When she became prime minister a number of pressing questions faced Thatcher at home and abroad: the economy, the unions, Ulster, Rhodesia, the Cold War in ...”

“... it as a transit camp for captured enemy pilots. The US army took it over in 1946, renamed it Camp King and used it for ‘special interrogations’, involving torture, beatings and drug injections, carried out by Counterintelligence Corps officers known as ‘rough boys’. The disposal of bodies was, one CIA officer recalled, ‘no problem’.The ‘rough ...”

“... view, ‘a wonderful rhetoric of faith in the rebirth of the Sacred City of the Revolution’. Charles Nicholl repeats Delahaye’s story to the effect that Rimbaud enlisted in a Communard militia, but like most commentators, believes this is a ‘tenuous anecdote’ which doesn’t line up with the dates of Rimbaud’s visits to Paris in 1871. Rickword ...”

“... poor Michael Davitt and his Land League only got a look in because they represented a headache for Charles Stewart Parnell. History was Daniel O’Connell, Parnell and John Redmond, who led the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster after Parnell. My grandfather had been interned after the 1916 Rising, and sometimes when the older generation in my family ...”

“... his stepfather, ‘the Orator writes all the University letters, makes all the Orations, be it to King, Prince, or whatever comes to the University.’ It required great skill as a Latinist and the willingness to apply that skill to the occasion at hand. Herbert hoped it would prove a stepping-stone to a position at court, as it had for the two previous ...”

“... my toughest competitor – if not in content, only in style?’ he asked. ‘Prince Charles,’ he answered. ‘I’m thinking of becoming an entertainer,’ he also said. ‘Liza Minnelli gets $75,000 a night to sing, and I’m really curious as to how I would do.’ ‘Yes,’ Andersen wrote, ‘in the blockbuster 1999: Casinos of the Third ...”

“... of the sonnets was given the pseudonym ‘Lise’. As editor of the Collected Poems, 1937-1971, Charles Thornbury has decided to follow the final 1947 version, thus restoring Lise’s real name and the sequence’s original title, ‘Sonnets to Chris’. (He has, though, retained the sonnets written in 1966 to round the sequence off, adding two – 115 and ...”

“... survived, so many still to come); the post-traumatic shock of being allowed into the showpiece. King’s College, the part the grockles are never allowed to photograph (too squalid, these ranks of distressed vinyl chairs). It’s unreal: all these floaters drifting in from the street, straight past the uniforms, unmolested; an atmosphere of subdued ...”

“... spin doctor, as a political consultant to write hymns in praise of his once and future king in the leader columns. The paper was repeating a giddy pattern set in the autumn. On 28 October Matthew Parris, the politician turned journalist, said in passing to Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight that Mandelson was gay. He wasn’t breaking a confidence: the ...”

“... followed the coffin of Emily Davison, who committed suicide by throwing herself in front of the King’s horse. Her account of Davison’s career is nobly felt and phrased, but hagiographical to the point where the reader starts niggling, and about points which may not be central to the theme. Twice she rejoices that the executioner was an ‘unmalicious ...”

“... The anthology represents him by the section of ‘Little Gidding’ in which the spirits of Charles I and Milton are jointly invoked. The political tone here is relatively conciliatory, all the more so in the final text from which the poet dropped those conservative martyrs Richard III and the Duke of Wellington. Paulin has described Geoffrey Hill as ...”

“... lead the world), Terry Harknett writes under the buckskin-evoking pseudonyms of George G. Gilman, Charles R. Pike, Thomas H. Stone. Like his compatriots ‘John G. MeLaglen’ and J.T. Edson, Harknett has ‘appreciation societies’ devoted to his pseudonymous personae. (‘J.T.’, incidentally, the biggest seller of them all, claims his name is ...”

“... Captain James Cook’s first circumnavigation of the world in the Endeavour in the late 1760s and Charles Darwin’s expedition to the Galapagos in the 1830s. William and Caroline Herschel’s advances in astronomy and Humphry Davy’s in chemistry dominate both Holmes’s history and the period itself, but Holmes is interested too in John ...”