“... he wrote twenty plays. By 1922, nine original O’Neill plays had appeared on Broadway. He was king on a field of corpses. ‘I want to howl: Imagination, Beauty, Daring, or bust,’ O’Neill wrote. He took enormous dramaturgical risks. To some, like the New Republic’s Eric Bentley, his bow-wow ‘big work’ was full of ‘cultural gas’, and mostly a ...”

“... two. In February, a relatively benign one, which brought to a sudden end the reign of the last king, Louis-Philippe, and sent him into exile (by cab, so rumour had it). Then, in June, the new republican administration having quickly proved too pussy-footing in its reforms for those on the left, a more violent and widespread workers’ uprising ...”

“... stage production. The play was George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer and the occasion the King’s birthday, 1789. Apparently, the convicts’ efforts to please ‘were not unattended with applause’. It is a queer little episode. The honoured king was mad. Europe itself was a little mad in 1789, one might ...”

“... came to Buckingham Palace in 1945 to present a loyal address at the end of World War Two, the king asked who these people were. ‘Some call them Quakers, Your Majesty.’ ‘Oh,’ the king said. ‘I didn’t know that there were any of them left.’ According to the protocols of sociologists of religion, the Quakers ...”

“... of Wales asked his father, George V, if he could have the use of Fort Belvedere at Windsor the king was surprised: ‘What could you possibly want that queer old place for? Those damn week-ends I suppose.’ He caved in and perhaps regretted it, for the weekends with their associated guests and amusements made possible the affair with Wallis Simpson and so ...”

“... Should we read the darkest of his plays – including Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, King Lear and Macbeth – as artefacts of these plague-ridden times? Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists delved into almost every dark corner of their audiences’ imaginations: murder, witchcraft, incest, civil war, apostasy. Playgoers saw rape victims stagger ...”

“... find it hard to do so – for instance, when Falstaff disappears, or rather turns into Sir John Oldcastle, since it is known that in early performances (though not in any printed form of the plays) that is what he was called. Oldcastle’s descendants protested, and the consequence was the presumably unique disclaimer in the Epilogue to 2 Henry IV. The ...”

“... In the middle of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, for example, we declined to publish an interview with King Hussein that had been obtained with great difficulty in favour of a diary from a reporter who lost his nerve and spent several days – or maybe it was just hours – cowering in his hotel bathroom. That was the sort of thing the high-ups didn’t ...”

“... to leave France in the face of royal prohibition, they continued to be busy and productive. John Houblon, from a Huguenot family which had arrived from France in a slightly earlier wave of Catholic persecution, became the first governor of the Bank of England in 1694 and a knight of the realm; until 2014, his luxuriantly bewigged features adorned our ...”

“... One day in 1950 I walked down Crown Passage, an alley between King Street and Pall Mall, to call on the Falcon Press in pursuit of money they owed me. The managing director Peter Baker had left letters unanswered and telephone calls unreturned, and sure enough he was out. I saw instead a harassed long-nosed man in a blue suit who said his name was Paul Scott, and that he was the company secretary ...”

“... order to save manpower. The Belgian élite wanted to avoid repeating the refusals of 1914-18, when King Albert I had held out heroically in an unoccupied corner of his country, while the vast majority of his citizens froze and starved under direct military occupation. The economy was closed down for what had been expected to be a brief hiatus, and the only ...”

“... but few of his forty-odd books have lasted, apart from his study of Curzon, his lives of King George V and of Tennyson, and his Byron, The Last Phase. A word, too, should be said for his life of his father, Lord Carnock, which he regarded as his best achievement. He wrote with care and in an elegant, limpid style: but there are times when one is ...”

“... for whom a palpably existent house is more important than a precise location. (The writer John Ryle reports a novel spin on this: he was shown round the house by a guide who maintained adamantly that it had once been the home of Rembrandt.) On the day of the inauguration Harar was abuzz with dignitaries and a concomitantly heavy presence of police and ...”

“... reverberations from those events reached a long way: as far as the Cold War, the assassination of John F. Kennedy (maybe), Watergate and, every four years to this day, the American presidential election. It is a story that reminds us of the bond – political, cultural, economic, sentimental – between the United States and Cuba, a bond that tightened in the ...”

“... history of the screenplay is complicated, and it seems clear that Orson Welles, Mankiewicz and John Houseman all had a hand in it. Mankiewicz signed a contract that meant he would receive payment for his work but not get a credit; later, he managed to get his name, along with Welles’s, on screen. The film’s single Oscar went to both of them. They had ...”