“... He favoured, broadly, two types of close, confiding friend: those whom he could coddle with a mother’s love, and those whom he could shower with the tart pinpricks of a maiden aunt’s disdain. Only the most exceptional people, or people in the most exceptional of circumstances, could cause him to vacillate: but it did happen, perhaps most often with ...”

“... to give her a book published in 2006, by the cultural historian Caroline Weber; it’s called Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. It’s not that I think we’re heading for a revolution. It’s rather that I saw Kate becoming a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung. In those days she ...”

“... He is best known as a translator rather than an inventor. The story goes that he was ordered by Queen Elizabeth to translate the whole of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso as a penance for having circulated copies of the bawdy tale of Jocundo among the ladies of court. Since Jocundo’s tale is about the compulsive infidelity ...”

“... Newfoundland, in an interval in his war service); he has had the pleasure of sitting in the Queen Mary’s cinema and seeing his own wedding (to the ballet dancer, Moira Shearer) featured in a newsreel as one of the ‘weddings of the year’ (the other being Elizabeth Taylor’s first). As a Liberal Parliamentary ...”

“... her favour while there were male Yorkists to mount a challenge. Her early years are obscure. Her mother, the great heiress Isabel Neville, died in 1476 after giving birth to her fourth child; this last baby, like Isabel’s first child, did not live. Margaret would have been too young to remember her mother, and it is ...”

“... sister ‘acted out a fantasy of social achievement’, orchestrated by their socially ambitious mother. The Ottawa Citizen reported their presentation to the Governor General in ‘a lovely bouquet of winsome girlhood’; in 1937 they were absorbed, both in London and Ottawa, in the preparations for King George VI’s coronation. Elizabeth – ‘all pink ...”

“... solely in the historical dramas, and supreme among them was the trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, in the great hall of Fotheringay Castle. The momentous event, the inevitability of which was conveyed in a way that no history book could rival, unfolded in distinct tableaux, in the third and last of which ...”

“... but fruitful, above nature yet also against nature. She could have been a benign second mother, and on your side, but she always seemed to be in cahoots with authority; she knew your every move, and had a low opinion of it. It was because of her purity that you had to guard your darker thoughts; each of your little sins was, you were assured, a ...”

“... this time? FW: I lived in a house in Trevor Square, just opposite Harrods. I moved there with my mother immediately after the war in 1946, and stayed there for absolutely ages. AH: How literary was your family? FW: Well, my mother was the daughter of Ada Leverson, who was a friend of Oscar Wilde: he called her the ...”

“... immutable trajectories. Diana told Andrew Morton in Diana: Her True Story that she would never be queen. In 1992 I reviewed the Morton book for this paper and mocked her prediction: ‘The premonition is never quite explained. Does she think that death is beckoning, or divorce, or is she planning to become a ...”

“... a touch of Monty Python’s Life of Brian about it (‘You mean you were raped?’ Brian asks his mother; ‘Well, at first,’ she replies) but, unpalatable as this mode of ‘seduction’ is to modern sensibility, it’s how it’s done in classical myth, the great model, of course, being the conquests of Zeus himself. Thetis may accept a mortal ...”

“... used to tell people that the Spanish Armada was the reason he had been born prematurely. ‘My mother gave birth to twins,’ he said, ‘myself and fear.’ He never shook off the sense of dread. More than half a century later, having fled England for France, he wrote Leviathan, predicated on the view that fear is the chief driver of man. Hobbes would ...”

“... soap opera centuries before the term was invented. Through the media, Charles and Di, the Queen Mum and Fergie, Wills and Harry have become familiar household presences. But though their personal foibles and imperfections have a fascination, we prefer most of the time an idealised rather than a mundane ...”

“... pride, ‘the oddest statistic to be found in any modern work of scholarship’. Even the young Queen was discovered insulting the Windsor shopkeepers with a gesture ‘ineradicably associated with ragamuffins’ and ‘cognate with such verbal expressions as “Does your mother know ...”

“... not yet clear how involved Lilibet II will be in palace matters but, under the influence of her mother and her yoga instructor, the preferred adverbs are likely to be ‘honestly’, ‘amazingly’, ‘insanely’ and ‘unbelievably’. Harry is deep in the sycamores of Montecito with his ghostwriter, grassing on his grandma, and they’re keeping it ...”