“... to ambiguity stands at the core of his shrewd exploration of executive power in Taming the Prince (1989). His topic – one that has become alarmingly central to America’s current predicament – is the long-term transformation of traditional rulership into modern executive authority, which embodies the energy needed for tackling crises but is ...”

“... in the crown’; ‘Charles, you’ve lost the best thing you ever had. Good luck to Wills and Harry,’ said one poster stuck to the railings of Buckingham Palace. As many people noted, the whole atmosphere was very ‘democratic’: rarely can the railings of our royal palaces have been treated with such disrespect. Posters, cards, letters, even rosaries ...”

“... Rogers, as a designer committed to modern precepts, was drawn into the fray, sometimes with the Prince of Wales as an antagonist. Perhaps these skirmishes impeded further large-office commissions in the London area in the 1980s; in any case, they returned in the 1990s. Among these buildings are the Channel 4 Headquarters near Victoria station (1990-94); 88 ...”

“... fictional engineering was never designed to work on mocking readers in the first place, but on the Harry Potter-primed ‘young adult’ market, full of girls longing for sex and scared rigid by the very thought. To whom, it seems, Edward is like a dream – he’s so clean and fragrant, for one thing. Meyer’s vampires neither eat nor sleep nor breathe, nor ...”

“... in Italy the following winter’. Their ‘union of souls’, as Jangfeldt (or his translator, Harry Watson) quaintly puts it, ‘took place in Venice in May 1893’. The relationship lasted until Victoria’s death in 1930, though it was severely strained during the First World War. Victoria, the daughter of Grand Duke Friedrich I of Baden and a cousin of ...”

“... ordinary countrymen showed little enthusiasm for that cause and had to be bullied to fight for Prince Charlie. A recruiter complained that the men of Dunkeld were ‘quite degenerat from their Ancestors, and not one spark of Loyalty among them’. But Atholl Highlanders, who had eagerly welcomed the Hanoverian Campbells, supposedly their traditional ...”

“... stockbrokers lacked the resources or incentive to undertake serious research into them. In 1896, Harry Lawson launched his unsound motor-car stock not with anything so mundane as a realistic prospectus, but with the dual attractions of the cricketer Prince Ranjitsinhji’s name and a London-to-Brighton car race. The ...”

“... and for those with high profiles, and the loudest cheers at the post-conference rally were for Prince Mawayizeni Zulu’s election to the NEC (the result of an arcane dynastic dispute with King Goodwill and Chief Buthelezi) – and for the presence of an Iraqi representative. What is one to make of an organisation which cheers both for a Zulu ...”

“... invasions, Mercian Berkshire to the north had been next on the Wessex merger list, with a Wessex prince born in the county as a conciliatory factor – just as, three centuries later, Edward I invested his Carnarvon-born son with the title of Prince of Wales to help enlist the Welsh on his side after his takeover of the ...”

“... with its penumbra of monastery buildings, complete enough to lend themselves for a scene or two in Harry Potter movies. Durham houses the tomb of early medieval Europe’s greatest historian, Bede, and that of another Anglo-Saxon monk, Cuthbert, probably a more effective bishop of Durham in death than in life. Cuthbert was also the name of the 16th-century ...”

“... by a dynastic alliance which was broken in 1837. The loss was the responsibility of bluff King Harry, who did not have the realism forced on his successors to confine his French crown to his coat of arms. His subjects might have been spared much misery if he had contented himself with what he had. A clear narrative emerges from Sharpe’s account. Henry ...”

“... to gather writers at her court. In 1772 Christoph Martin Wieland was hired as tutor to the crown prince, the classic occupation of the late 18th-century man of letters. Goethe arrived three years later, fresh from the Europe-wide success of The Sorrows of Young Werther. He recommended another polymath, Johann Gottfried Herder, who arrived in 1776 and became ...”

“... Book Award for Between the World and Me, his essay on race and violence. Coates’s close friend Prince Jones was killed in Virginia in 2000. ‘When Prince Jones died, there were no cameras. There was nobody looking. The officer that killed him was not prosecuted. He was not even disciplined by the police force.’ In the ...”

“... penury and disgrace. The overweening monarch of the midland and north-eastern networks, friend of Prince Albert and snapper-up of country houses, he devised the ruse later known as the Ponzi scheme – inflating the price of shares by boosting dividends with capital. The aggregate losses of the inevitable crash amounted to some £80 million. By 1854 only half ...”