“... 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 ...”

“... than rows of ponderous foxhunters, fat with Staffordshire and Devonshire ale, men who drank to the King across the Water and believed all the fundholders were Jews,’ is, Runciman says, to lapse into ‘too much conscious literary merit to be counted even under the most generous rubric’ – and Runciman’s own rubric stretches to history itself – ‘as ...”

“... in which Charlemagne fell’; and [Fowler] wonders whether Milton may be contrasting the greater Charles with his own later monarch, who went to Fuenterrabia in 1659 to engage in some ignoble diplomacy. This speculation ... provides a genuinely fascinating context for Fontarabbia; but it is a context which (like all scholarly contexts) defines the field of ...”

“... when en route to France in June 1918. The duke had told him that he was the uncle of both King George V and the Kaiser (both of them grandsons of Queen Victoria) in a manner which suggested to Lea that the European establishment would make sure the Kaiser was protected, and so prompted him to undertake his own expedition. He was almost certainly ...”

“... of a less prestigious medical team hastily assembled by the Capucin exorcists, neither the King’s physicians nor he himself seem to have felt the slightest doubt that Marthe was a fraud being used for political ends. Professor Walker’s discussion of the surrounding circumstances only strengthens this withering diagnosis. He is particularly ...”

“... for Mediterranean exile, or with Janet Browne’s recent first volume of a large-scale life of Charles Darwin. Holmes asks what we might now think of Coleridge had he died shipwrecked off Sicily. The audit is positive: what came next, according to Holmes, only damaged his startling early achievements. Even more tantalising questions might be asked of a ...”

“... discipline by including previously unpublished essays on Beckett’s Endgame and Shakespeare’s King Lear, both written in a new and freer style that was (as he puts it) ‘for richer, or poorer, rather over the edge’. Since then, he has made a habit of defying professional expectations, commenting extensively on film and also on Thoreau and ...”

“... and concludes nervously: ‘that man inspires by fear.’ Chapter 7, ‘At the Court of the Sun King’, spells it out. The generous, inspiring proprietor who so charmingly persuaded those journalists not to turn against their editor, is transformed by his protégé into Rupert Fear. He is, to start with, ‘much more right-wing than is generally ...”

“... and ensure that the Indian Christians, though still a minority, would eventually come to govern. Charles Kingsley – another of the founders – supported the South in the American Civil War. The passage of time did not bring any further coherence to Christian socialism: a theologically-based morality does not confer any greater certitude than the secular ...”

“... places, like Dover, where immigration politics always matter, but at the Romsey by-election Charles Kennedy made such a point of his comparatively liberal attitude to asylum-seekers that hardly any voter could have been unaware that asylum-seeking was an electoral issue. Although psephological wisdom has it that the Conservative defeat was due to ...”

“... intolerable, unstoppable and, in war at least, indispensable. He was bred to it. His father, Sir Charles Jackson, was a Monmouthshire architect-developer, lawyer and politician who, among other things, built up a large collection of silver which virtually is the National Museum of Wales’s collection and bought shares in a then obscure Sunday newspaper ...”