“... unseen cameraman who’d followed my public career. Since apparently I could do no wrong with this young lady … Losing your virginity to a woman who has already constructed a shrine in your honour: what could be more transcendentally egotistical than that? Schmitt says that one of the characteristics of political romantics is that they lack a gift for real ...”

“... engineering students who had joined the Steinmetz Society, a discussion group affiliated with the Young Communist League. The accounts of the people who knew him then – though is it just because they know how the story ends? – emphasise his gullibility and unworldliness. Ethel’s brother David claimed that during the war Julius strode into the Russian ...”

“... of the Temple when the Terror was at its height, without experiencing certain qualms.’ Baron Arthur Léon Imbert de Saint Amand began his late 19th-century biography of Marie-Thérèse from a place of desolation. Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, Madame Royale, later Duchesse d’Angoulême was the first child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and the sister ...”

“... in that most plangently proto-British of pre-1707 literary works, Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. With his family connections stretching from Cornwall to Orkney, and his continual struggle to hold together a quarrelsome pan-British government against enemies both within and without, you’d think King Arthur would ...”

“... the very great artists of our time’, as the museum curator Peter Selz thought, or was he, as Arthur Danto puts it, ‘overproductive, repetitive and shallow’? Naive, or a self-consciously calculating opportunist? The canny ‘manager of his own fairyland’ (Jean Cassou), or a painter who carefully cultivated his image as a ‘loveable, fantastical ...”

“... now wasn’t the first instance of its kind. A hundred years before, the poets Alfred Tennyson and Arthur Hallam, with a number of their Cambridge friends, had been heavily involved in a conspiracy to free Spain from despotic Bourbon rule. The leader was General José Torrijos, a romantic veteran of the Peninsular War who was living in exile with other Spanish ...”

“... Mother, Earth Mother or Mother Goddess. Distinguished scholars pioneered the idea, including Sir Arthur Evans, who excavated Knossos, and the Cambridge classicist Jane Harrison, who proposed a prehistoric and peaceful woman-centred civilisation in Greece. The discovery of Palaeolithic ‘Venus figurines’, statuettes with exaggerated breasts and ...”

“... that extended across Europe into Russia. When she died her great-grandson Albert Frederick Arthur George was five and not in the direct line of succession. Finding himself at the age of 41 seated on Edward I’s coronation chair in Westminster Abbey amid ‘the red, the gold, the gilt, the grandeur’, he was full of nerves and foreboding. ‘This is ...”

“... constrained by esoteric etiquette. Manners and Rules of Good Society decreed, bafflingly, that ‘young ladies do not eat cheese at dinner parties.’ After their cheeseless dinner the ladies withdrew and when the gentlemen joined them bridge was ‘the chief if not the only amusement’. Consuelo Vanderbilt, one of a number of American heiresses whose ...”

“... work ethic imbued in him by his Orangeman father. He lost his father’s religious framework as a young man but read avidly in theology, philosophy and self-improving literature, searching for another set of values to shape his existence. He found one in the duty of work – for its own sake, but also in order to understand the underlying order of the world ...”

“... Born,​ out of wedlock, in Rome in 1880 to a high-spirited, convent-educated but unconventional young aristocrat of Russian, Polish and Italian descent, the poet Apollinaire was given no fewer than five prénoms by his mother: his full name, in its French version, was Guillaume-Albert-Wladimir-Alexandre-Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky ...”

“... Dolly Varden, in Barnaby Rudge, a locksmith’s daughter and the most overtly sexual of his young heroines, is ogled as relentlessly by the novel’s narrator as she is by a squad of suitors of her own age and class whom we are clearly meant to regard as altogether less eligible than him. During the ‘No Popery!’ riots of June 1780, two of the ...”

“... other than in written notes. George was now next in line to the throne after his father, but the young duke and duchess of York soon found that royal powerlessness began at home. It took them years to rescue their eldest sons from the clutches of a sadistic nanny who cut short the boys’ meetings with their parents by administering cruel pinches. For all ...”

“... forward over Peru’s apocalyptic years, from 1965 to 1986. At the starting-point a philosophical young revolutionary, Gabriel Lung (he has Chinese blood), falls in love with Elena Silves (she has Portuguese blood). Elena has a religious vision and performs a confirmatory miracle. She is imprisoned by the authorities in a convent. Gabriel becomes a ...”

“... continually remind us that Aids is ‘the gay disease’, no government education programmes for young people have been aimed at the gay audience in either country. It is said that brochures about Aids had to be smuggled into England from America in diplomatic pouches, so that they would not be confiscated as pornography. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome ...”