“... Her fictional heroine was Becky Sharp. Spurning overtures from a sputtering peer, a decrepit Duke of Newcastle and an unappealing millionaire, she settled for a stolid, seemingly solid, squire called Clayton Glyn, who unknown to her had begun living on capital. On their honeymoon Clayton is reputed to have hired a swimming pool at Brighton for two days ...”

“... we now have Tom Cruise in place of Bogart. A variety of voices are cited. Sharon Waxman in the New York Times attributes the loss of ‘man’s men’ to what she believes (against a good deal of evidence) to be the entirely peaceful and cosseted existence everyone in the US has been living since the end of World War Two. She bemoans the loss of ‘the ...”

“... second-class citizens, because no longer a first-class threat. The death in 1807 of the Cardinal Duke of York, the last pretender, had put an end to the exiled Stuart court in Rome and the suspicion and espionage that had for a century poisoned Anglo-Roman relations. Ranke declared in his History of the Popes (1840) that ...”

“... with his cosier, story-book brothers like Friar Laurence, or the fundamentally sound disguised Duke of Measure for Measure. Any artist, furthermore, might be expected to feel hostility to the iconoclastic Protestants’ destructiveness. Much quoted in this context is Sonnet 73, with its allusion to ‘Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds ...”

“... was completing his comprehensive Bibliography of Thomas Carlyle’s Writings. The multi-volume Duke-Edinburgh edition of the Collected Letters owes a great deal to the American Carlyle scholar and founding editor C.R. Sanders. The new Strouse Carlyle Edition, intended to replace the unsatisfactory and unannotated 30-volume Centenary Edition (1896-99), is ...”

“... juicy scandal, as in 1809, when it was discovered that Mary Anne Clarke, the mistress of the Duke of York, commander-in-chief of the army, had been using her position to broker the sale of commissions.Historians​  of later periods will benefit from applying Knights’s big themes to subsequent stages of the ...”

“... but he was a stylist whose personality was best expressed in imitation. ‘By the way,’ the New York Times’s reviewer wrote in 1905, ‘there’s a sort of old-fashioned touch about some of it, and now and then a suggestion of Thackeray’ – which was a funny thing to mention as an afterthought, since a relished old-fashionedness is one of the book’s ...”

“... speaker. It won’t happen, of course, and in this morning’s Guardian the name of the Duke of Edinburgh is put forward to spearhead the campaign. It’s only in the middle of the afternoon that I remember the date.9 April. I’m waiting at the lights by St Mark’s Church when a family – grandfather, son and grandson – cross. The grandfather ...”

“... are bent To dim his glory, and to stain the track Of his bright passage to the Occident. The Duke of York replies: looks he like a king: behold his eye, bright as is the eagle’s, lightens forth Controlling majesty. Alack, alack for woe, That any harm should stain so fair a show. The link between these speeches and ...”

“... This new situation outraged a previous royal uncle by marriage, Anne Boleyn’s uncle the Duke of Norfolk. Norfolk needed pacifying, not least because he was the biggest snob in all Tudor England, but more specifically because if anyone was responsible for defeating the Pilgrimage of Grace, it was him. Cromwell could not afford to antagonise Norfolk ...”

“... returned with his wife, Dinah, from an expatriate life as a night-club proprietor and DJ in New York and set about restoring the family seat to its former splendour. The Rebirth of an English Country House, written by the new earl and Tim Knox, reproduces a passage from the journal of an 18th-century traveller called Joseph Pococke, who visited in 1754 and ...”

“... skills were world-renowned. Diana, after all, was no longer an authentic royal. Nor was the Duke of Windsor. Nor is Mohamed al-Fayed. After the humiliating DTI Report, and the refusal of his applications for citizenship, al-Fayed apparently shifted the focus of his regal aspirations. Spumed by the real-life British royals, he turned to an ...”

“... sister of two leading Yiddish actors, Maurice and Fanny Waxman, whose roles on the London and New York stages included Hamlet and Medea. My father was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, grew up in Darlington, and always had a slight Northern accent. He was one of a large family: Abe; then Bec, the one girl; then my father, Philip, called Phil but Phishel at ...”

“... Shakespeare, who’s a bit of a poet. People who defined a new movement in their time.’The New York Times ended a few days of self-suppression with a summation of the Trump lobby’s atmospherics. ‘For Donald J. Trump’s most ardent supporters,’ it said,the assassination attempt on Saturday was the climax and confirmation of a story that Mr Trump has ...”