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“... The death of Alexander III in 1286 without surviving issue and the subsequent death in 1290 of his young granddaughter, Margaret, Maid of Norway, while she was being brought to Scotland, left no clear heir and the kingdom plummeted into political turmoil. The main competitors for the throne in the ensuing Great Cause (overseen by ...”

“... a woman’s thing.”’) It is not hard to imagine the surprise of Florence, the girlfriend of Edward Mayhew, a nice girl in her early twenties from a nice background in Ian McEwan’s new novel, On Chesil Beach, when ‘one Saturday afternoon in late March, with the rain falling heavily outside the windows . . . she let her hand rest briefly on, or ...”

“... and title was born out of the struggle waged by Les Cannon, Jock Byrne and the later deleted Mark Young against the Communist leadership which had rigged elections in a style which would have done credit to the Kennedys or the Daleys in Chicago. The ETU resistance (it was hardly less) had received no succour from the mainstream of the Trade Union ...”

“... poet-painter was the 20th child of a dodgy stockbroker? Yes, it was the man in the runcible hat, Edward Lear. His latest biographer, Peter Levi, confides to us that, like Lear’s mother, his own grandmother also had 21 children. Easily lured into digression, Levi adds that ‘it is not uncommon in such families that by some mysterious compensation of nature ...”

“... his wife in an intrigue. She left her home, I think, with another man – and left her two young daughters. The episode was brief and disastrous – the other man left her in turn, and the husband took her back.’ James then went on to outline the details, as told to him by Lady Gregory, of the husband taking her back. It came with a condition: that ...”

“... Macdonald, an independent woman tied by an early marriage to the demanding, fickle, hypochondriac Edward Burne-Jones, who first took sick on their wedding night – the intended honeymoon was in Paris, but they got no further than Chester. The Macdonald family’s origins were modest. They were from Methodist stock, their paternal grandfather had been ...”

“... Edward Hopper languished into his forties as a commercial illustrator. He got his first break thanks to a boost from a fellow artist called Josephine Verstille Nivison, who in the fall of 1923 got the Brooklyn Museum to include him in a group show to which she had been invited to contribute. He married her the following year ...”

“... bracelet and gold rings on several fingers. His companion, a fine-featured, decidedly handsome young Indian in equally stylish gear and with even more jewellery, was almost girlish. Once the presidente identified himself as a Jesuit, I switched to Latin to show off. He mumbled some phrases of his own in Latin before replying in excellent Italian. For eight ...”

“... were the ‘Tudor’ characteristics – those possessed in common by Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I? Ruthlessness? At first, that seems a promising answer. After all, even Edward VI before his premature death managed to exhibit his father’s notorious ‘frown’. Unfortunately, the ...”

“... of painting – is how Degas characterised him. John Singer Sargent, ‘The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit’ (1882) It is hard to imagine that anyone looking at The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit would want to accuse its creator of shallowness. The facility for which Sargent would later become famous may have ...”

“... In Marlowe’s Edward II, the royal favourite Gaveston plans delicious entertainments which ‘may draw the pliant king which way I please’. He will introduce musicians to the court, ‘wanton poets’, Italian masques by night, and ‘pleasing shows’. Edward, walking abroad, is to encounter pages dressed as ‘sylvan nymphs’, and Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s shape With hair that gilds the water as it glides, Crownets of pearl about his naked arms, And in his sportful hands an olive tree, To hide those parts which men delight to see, Shall bathe him in a spring ...”

“... chimes regularly, it is all very regular, even the drunks are regular in their drunkenness. The young people regularly long for London or hanker after Hollywood, finding reality in soap operas, perhaps not seeing the soap opera in their own realities. In the reality of Josie Keenan, abused by her father, raised in a clay-cold, loveless, nun-fusty ...”

“... tears whenever he was saying goodbye to his (far tougher) wife, Eleanor, and his son, the future Edward I. After his blood row with Edward in 1260, he at first refused to see him, because ‘if he appears before me, I could not stop myself kissing him.’ Unlike his tight-fisted father, King John, Henry was generous to a ...”

“... are famous) and Naples (Sir William Hamilton). There were political refugees, notably Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, and his brother, the Cardinal Duke of York (who was born in Rome and left only once to go to Paris in 1745 and prepare to go to England should the rebellion be successful). Many Jacobites had ...”

“... he describes whatever suits him with an intelligence that cheers itself up as it goes. He – Edward Manners – has come to a mythical, silt-choked, fallen Flemish city (Ghentwerp? Brugeselles? some hybrid, anyway) to start fresh by tutoring two boys in English. One is the son of an art historian who has been plugging away at a catalogue raisonné of a ...”