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“... I was a friend and devoted admirer of Peter Cook for thirty years but I never realised until I read this book how much our early lives had overlapped. We were born in the same week into the same sort of family. His father, like mine, was a colonial servant rushing round the world hauling down the Imperial flag. At one stage both fathers were ensnared in the argument about the most appropriate capital for the West Indies Federation: an argument as vexed as it was futile since the Federation lasted only a few months ...”

“... his stories by Harper’s. Three of his novels were filmed (one by a remarkable artist, Peter Ustinov). His plays were produced in the West End, by Tyrone Guthrie, Ustinov, Gielgud. He won medals for two of his children’s books, and the War Office commissioned books from him, as did Drambuie and Rio Tinto Zinc. His works were finally issued by ...”

“... and costs; and impose fines. All this was, of course, far too draconian for the Government, and Peter Brooke, the new Heritage Secretary (David Mellor having been felled by the People over his affair with Antonia de Sancha), soon made it clear that nothing too terrible would be done to the newspapers. The Commission’s independence needed to be ...”

“... royal family when he was recommended to DJ their parties by mutual contacts, including the Prince of Monaco and Seif Gaddafi, son of Libyan dictator Moammar (“They’re huge G-Unit fans,” the DJ said).’ The last time Whoo Kid turned up in Bahrain he found Jackson drinking lemonade by some profoundly extravagant swimming-pool. They went to supper ...”

“... Beast – will perhaps never escape the sickly aura of a beautiful princess singing ‘Some day my prince will come’ (birds tweet) and then getting her prince, who hunkily displays the cartoonist’s idea of a lantern jaw, which those of us with more slender jawlines and less musculature I’m sure would heartily like to ...”

“... tone reflects Machiavelli’s already hoary demonisation. Along with his other works, The Prince and the Discourses had figured almost a century earlier on the first Index Librorum Prohibitorum, issued in the Counter-Reformation pontificate of Paul IV, on the suspect grounds that they had fuelled the corruption of French politics. In the preface to ...”

“... justified the annexation of Crimea with a bouquet of historical memories, from the baptism of ‘Prince Vladimir of Rus’ in the tenth century up to the severance of the East Slav peoples at the fall of the Soviet Union. In fact, however, Russian history is scarred by deep discontinuities, abrupt transitions from one set of rulers to another, which would ...”

“... plausible. McWilliam himself is reminded of the popular enthusiasm for Queen Caroline after the Prince Regent had been so horrible to her. We are more likely to think of Princess Diana, who, allowing for weight and age, triggers many of the same responses. Reading about the huge crowds that sang the Claimant to Newgate and greeted him on his release and ...”

“... 55 poets, you feel, blush for it. Mostly they contradict it. The style of interesting poets like Peter Didsbury, John Ash, Pauline Stainer and one of the editors, Michael Hulse, is not particularly ‘democratic’, but playfully enigmatic and donnish. There is a tendency to think aloud with a somewhat creaky jauntiness, as if the poets were sharing secrets ...”

“... were to be echoed a quarter of a century later upon a no less memorable early death, that of Henry Prince of Wales, the heir not only to the throne but to Sidney’s role of lost Protestant leader. No one mourned Sidney’s passing more profoundly than the best qualified and most influential of those imaginative early biographers, Fulke Greville, whose life of ...”

“... who had originally made Eugénie’s riding-habits. The same year Henry Poole became tailor to the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, and soon both Worth and Poole, who had actually helped finance the Emperor’s return to France, had established a vast clientele of kings, princes and grand-dukes, stretching across Europe and beyond. Worth dressed the ...”

“... to pass by him in the Chace’. At the Hôtel Matignon in Paris he met the King of Denmark and the Prince of Monaco, who called him a ‘silly Boy’ when he admitted to wanting to leave France and the service of the marquis for home. By the following year he’d changed his mind about leaving, though not for the reasons the ...”

“... private subscription set up by Sir James Clark (the Queen’s physician), Michael Faraday and the Prince Consort. Its first director, recruited from Germany, was August Wilhelm von Hofmann. Perkin became a student there in 1853. Hofmann was already investigating coal-tar derivatives, aniline in particular. He had also speculated that it might be possible to ...”

“... placed upon them. He might have added that the relative powerlessness of that ‘paradoxical prince’, the doge, bred contempt for an official who was seen as no more than a ‘tavern sign’, a ‘painted king’, a ‘dumb figure’, a ‘King of China’, as contemporaries variously put it. This divorce between power and status may even have helped ...”

“... said. ‘It wasn’t that she knew anything about buildings, but it was like having the crown prince present.’ But Lambert wasn’t the sort of person happy just to supervise. When a model needed to be built, she offered to help: the offer was rejected but she stayed late anyway to watch it being finished. When Mies drew her attention to the excellence ...”