“... their jobs at Göttingen after protesting against the suspension of the constitution by the new king of Hanover, Ernst August, in 1837. After the revolution of 1848 Jacob was briefly a representative at the Frankfurt National Assembly, where he supported the establishment of a constitutional monarchy over a united Germany. But he was a liberal rather than a ...”

“... wife and four older children in Warrington, where he had served six terms as mayor. So Ken went to King Edward’s School, got a better education than he would have found at most boarding-schools, grew up heterosexual and entered Magdalen, Oxford in 1945 on a demyship of £50 a year. His spending allowance, ten pounds a week, was larger than that of most ...”

“... a draft deferment every bit as opportunist as Clinton’s. He also supported the Martin Luther King movement, and paid generous tribute to it (criticising his own party for its abstention and opposition) in his inaugural address as Speaker. Furthermore, he has admitted to smoking dope, to divorcing his first wife while she was in the recovery room after a ...”

“... We, too, can invoke history to explain our hesitation. Seven hundred years ago, Dante wrote King Milutin of Rascia into the book that lies open on the Day of Judgment. Milutin’s sin, the imperial eagle explains to the poet in the Paradiso, was to forge Venetian ducats (‘il conio di Vinegia’). Today his remote descendant Milan ...”

“... Frye to sue the other members. When they protested through the Lords of the Admiralty to the King, the Chief Justice had the whole lot of them arrested for contempt and released them, when they apologised, with the warning: ‘Whosoever set themselves up in opposition to the law or think themselves above the law will find themselves mistaken.’ Why ...”

“... on tape. Scoop! The difficulty was that the Foreign Office funded the World Service. As I left King Charles Street, I called the BBC to say I had a story. By the time I got back to the office, a manager had already called FCO officials to apologise. Straw’s loss of temper was never broadcast and the offending part of the tape was purged from the ...”

“... iv) in a review by Kingsley, Ricks notices the witty conflation of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the King Charles spaniel in I ix – but others are of real significance. Ricks doesn’t cite Tennyson’s revealing comment that the narrator’s belief in the innate patriotism of the commercial classes (‘For I trust if an enemy’s fleet came yonder round ...”

“... to be taken seriously (while not forgetting that Shakespeare is also characterised by Henry IV and King John and Timon and Cymbeline). If Dryden died three hundred years ago, then a tercentenary feels like the right moment to ask what his Hamlet is, or what it is that we now recommend him for. The interest of the question is increased, though also ...”

“... in London.’ She doesn’t mention the reason she came south: when she was three her father, Charles, left and the family was forced to uproot. Her parents had not been happily married; Charles had wanted to be a sailor since he’d been a child but had been pressured by his mother to take over the family business. It ...”

“... founding families, are fairly heavy on Kerry’s mother’s side and his kinsman Robert Charles Winthrop was a senator for Massachusetts in 1850. Lowell’s portrait of that society, ‘91 Revere Street’, creaks with patrician relatives and Edwardian furniture, people with large trust funds and profound neuroses, ‘an unspoiled faith in the ...”

“... lose them.’ While Wellcome was the impetus and the chequebook behind the collection, Charles Thompson, its first curator, was the unrecognised hero. Thompson ran what Larson describes as ‘a well-oiled acquisition machine’, a network of agents and buyers who trawled the globe for antiquities. He wrote weekly progress reports to Wellcome ...”

“... high on the wall above him – a faintly preposterous rehash of the mirror in Las Meninas, where king and queen make their necessary appearance. The dialogue in Goya – the shadow play, the hovering between repetition and caricature – seemed to me to drain both parties (I presumed that the figure on the wall was an ancestor, or maybe the monarch ...”

“... chiefs of staff took very different approaches to the role of counsellor. Timothy, the philosopher-king of blue-collar Conservatism, hoped to reposition the Tories as a statist national party working in the interests of all classes, not just the fortunate haves. Hill was more intuitive and less wordy. But on one thing they concurred: the role of favourite ...”

“... telegraphing Lys to come and rescue him. The redoubtable Barbara, who had been the mistress of King Farouk, possibly contributed a germ of influence to the formidable figure of Pamela Flitton in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. Where such entanglements were concerned, Connolly was a comic masochist, not a tragic one; and in that sense very ...”

“... a political right. The experience of military rule in the 1650s persuaded most Englishmen that a king who had his own army would be able to impose taxes without Parliamentary consent. If the people were to be free, the sovereign must be disarmed. But the nation must be able to defend itself against invaders, so a volunteer army made up of county militias ...”