“... decision to get rid of him. It is not relevant to this particular discussion to consider whether Charles Douglas-Home, his successor, was a good choice. (I happen to think he was.) The point is that any editor of the Times will survive only so long as he can manage to stay in step with Rupert Murdoch. The guarantees given about the appointment and dismissal ...”

“... She was arrested a week later in Philadelphia for ‘inciting to riot’ by Detective-Sergeant Charles Jacobs, who, on the train back to New York, offered to drop the charges if she informed on her comrades; she threw a glass of cold water in his face. The judge described her as a ‘dangerous woman’ and sentenced her to a year at Blackwell’s Island ...”

“... like lichen and, on closer inspection, like blight. Monk and Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, Nat King Cole (the After Midnight Sessions with Sweets Edison, Stuff Smith and Juan Tizol), Ralph Stanley and his Clinch Mountain Boys, Ray Charles. And towards the end of the day, with the setting sun doing something wonderful ...”

“... in support of this definition seem to tell a different story. They include a letter of 1829 by Charles Lamb, in which he speaks of ‘true broad Hogarthian fun’, and an essay by Carlyle of 1837: ‘There is nothing more Hogarthian comic.’ Next comes Swinburne, fifty years later, speaking of ‘an excellent Hogarthian comedy, full of rapid and vivid ...”

“... terms of the treaties of 1884 and 1908 France had a pre-emptive right to the Congo if the Belgian king surrendered his. The Congolese disagreed. France backed Moïse Tshombe’s breakaway state of Katanga in the Congo against the UN, and it strongly supported Biafra in the hope of breaking up Nigeria, the dominant Anglophone state in West Africa. Sometimes ...”

“... estate in Leeds: but right bang on top of the interview list if her old man happens to be the next king of England. Early on in Diana: Her True Story (isn’t that a nice title?), I find myself vindicated in my zinging light theory by best friend Carolyn, who assures us: ‘I’m not a terribly spiritual person but I do believe that she was meant to do what ...”

“... the reading of wounded Tommies and discovered that their favourite authors were Nat Gould, Charles Garvice and E. Phillips Oppenheim. She defended their lowbrow preferences stoutly: ‘Our wounded warriors have surely earned the right to amuse themselves with the books that please them most, and to be free from the kind of officious pedantry that would ...”

“... rhythms and pressures. Verlaine captured the relation perfectly: ‘The profound originality of Charles Baudelaire is ... to represent modern man, powerfully and in his essence ... modern man, with his sharpened, vibrant senses, his painfully subtle mind, his brain saturated with tobacco, his blood burnt with alcohol.’ The ghost in the exhausted machine ...”

“... began to speak of himself as a successor to the imperial Spanish monarchs of the 16th century, to Charles V, who governed most of Europe, and his son Philip II, who sent the Armada against England and built the Escorial to house his bones. He had delusions, too, about the catastrophic state of the Spanish economy during the Second World War and its ...”

“... studiously unintellectual, pattern-cut products of the public schools. Alfred Tennyson’s Uncle Charles, convinced that his family was descended from the Medieval d’Eyncourts, devoted his patrimony to converting a modest Lincolnshire house into the imposing Bayons Manor, ‘the most convincing re-creation yet put up in England of the manor house of a ...”

“... written but four of them, at least, rather good. Three of the four are by Richard Usborne, the king of the traditional Wodehouse buffs. The other is by Benny Green, the new broom. Oxford University and the Pierpont Morgan Library are both relevant to Wodehouse’s life. He did not attend a university, though he would have liked to: but he has been much ...”

“... was blown about like that,’ and had him remove unauthorial steps from his illustration to ‘King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid’. He was dealing with Pre-Raphaelites, whose notions of fidelity to text were flexible, but Altick describes this kind of confrontation as ‘a favourite form of journalistic pedantry’. Popular taste, which proved unkind to ...”

“... the Church of the Holy Sepulchre). The tale of exclusion that started in a cowshed ends with the King of the Jews shut out from the would-be capital of his people, an apt incongruity for one whose kingdom was not of this world. In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown notes that walls symbolise the will to closure. As inherited tracts of ...”

“... to settle on whether to speak to him from inside or outside his own voice. In his ‘Tomb of Charles Baudelaire’, Mallarmé called his predecessor a ‘poison tutélaire/Toujours à respirer si nous en périssons’ (‘a tutelary poison/we breathe always though we die of it’). It’s a neat way of imagining the powerful poet as the air we ...”

“... credit for the outcome. With the Armistice in place, he returned home to receive the accolades of king and country. Elevated to a peerage, he became Earl Haig of Bemersyde. Then with almost unseemly haste, he was eased into oblivion. In the war’s aftermath, Winston Churchill wrote, Haig ‘was given no work. He did not join in the counsels of the nation; he ...”