“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... delighting in imaginary ‘sport’ with bevies of accommodating lovelies, including Mrs Steward, Charles II’s inamorata, and the queen (even in fantasy, Pepys was a staunch royalist). ‘The best that was ever dreamed,’ he chortled over a night-time’s romp with the delectable Lady Castlemaine, another of Charles’s ...”

“... the way the reality effect is created with a character, but particularity helps here too. When Charles Bovary first sees Emma, he ‘was surprised by the whiteness of her fingernails. They were glossy, delicate at the tips, more carefully cleaned than Dieppe ivories, and filed into almond shapes.’ Obviously, this tells us something, with great ...”

“... in the Fifties when Stan Cullis’s Wolverhampton Wanderers adopted the ideas of a Wing-Commander Charles Reep. Reep had invented a theory called POMO, or Point of Maximum Opportunity, which involved getting the ball to the aforesaid point as soon as possible: the long-ball game, in short. He worked out a formula which would guarantee a team promotion: S ...”

“... seemed to her sensible and amiable lawyer father, or to a family friend, the rising young diplomat Charles Ritchie, who was to meet Elizabeth Bowen in London in the war and become the great love of her life. Our Elizabeth’s father was one of those people who, as his friends said, ‘always gave a lot more than he got’, and in an odd sense his daughter ...”

“... to that poem’s all-male cast. ‘The Journey’ and the book’s final poem, ‘The Glass King’, in which the mad Charles VI of France and his wife Isabella of Bavaria become emblems of Boland’s sense of the place of lyric poetry in domestic life, are complex, self-reflexive and sharply affecting; they indicate ...”

“... incidental detail; the story itself is simple enough. It tells how Freddie Montgomery (Frederick Charles St John Vanderveld Montgomery, if you please), stout, blond, of some intellect and no substance, king of the expatriate castle on a Mediterranean island, carelessly finds himself owing money to one Señor Aguirre, a ...”

“... she has even appropriated the Royal insignia for her notepaper. However, Thatcher was like King Midas in reverse. Everything she touched was magically transformed into lead: a metered liberty, the lowest common denominator of coinage. For the golden refulgence of Monarchy this was fatal. Something which ceases being priceless can only appear absurdly ...”

“... themselves, are the press barons and their editors: Henry Nannen, Rupert Murdoch, Frank Giles and Charles Douglas-Home. That Trevor-Roper should have ‘taken the bona fides of the editor’ – of Stern – ‘as a datum’ passes belief. Probably he has never read the magazine. However, journalists, excluding proprietors, generally have a better nose for ...”

“... in all ages and places,’ he writes to Emerson – a ‘book written by a wild man’, ‘looking king and beggar in the face with an indifference of brotherhood,’ he tells his brother. There has not been in ‘a hundred years any book that came more direct and flamingly sincere from the heart of man’. After it is all over, and after another long stretch ...”