“... from constituencies with a wide franchise), the machinations of the government were widely known. Richard Carlile, the editor of the Republican, concluded that ‘the ministers have been playing with Thistlewood … they brought the Cato-street affair to maturity, just to answer their purposes for striking terror into the minds of the people on the eve of a ...”

“... In fact, some of the best-known roles for castrati were the alpha males Alexander the Great, Richard I, Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar. Boys were castrated to make them better and stronger singers, not to make them girls. On the other hand, while living in the house of a Russian prince the castrato Balatri ‘gained unheard of access to the sexually ...”

“... naval base, black servicemen revolted when white soldiers celebrated the death of Martin Luther King by raising the Confederate flag. The US military leadership fumblingly tried to accommodate the growing number of Black Power activists in Vietnam – military bureaucrats started investigating commanders who did not allow black troops to wear Afros and ...”

“... defined by reference to the Earth’s dimensions. When Britain obstructed these strange notions, Richard Cobden lamented his countrymen’s ‘Chinese conservatism’. On the whole, however, co-operation outweighed controversy. The French dominated the natural sciences and mathematics, but admired the British steam engine and its manifold applications. At ...”

“... or messengers. Ellison’s dream was of a different kind. His friends included the black novelist Richard Wright and critics like Kenneth Burke and Stanley Edgar Hyman; his heroes were Joyce and Eliot; he studied The Golden Bough for the mythical themes he hoped would make his novel immortal. Ellison aspired mightily and he dressed the part as he imagined ...”

“... the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king’. The book is illustrated with photographs of de Pury’s friends, such as Tita Thyssen-Bornemisza (wearing a ‘100+ carat diamond’), Al Taubman and Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis. De Pury was private curator to Baron ‘Heini’ – Hans Heinrich ...”

“... that came before him. And BBC managers are unsackable. In the recent judgment on the Cliff Richard case, besides criticising the rationale behind broadcasting the story in the first place (which, typically enough, was in part to avoid criticism for not broadcasting it), the judge found that the UK news editor was not a reliable witness and that the ...”

“... admitting ‘apparent bias’ in overruling planning inspectors and the local council to approve Richard Desmond’s Westferry Printworks development – 24 hours before the introduction of hefty new levies that would have cost the Conservative donor an estimated £45 million. A few weeks earlier, Desmond, the former owner of the Express newspapers, had ...”

“... Eugénie Servières’s Inès de Castro and Her Children Throwing Themselves at the Feet of King Alphonso IV of Portugal (1822) was both a richly coloured medieval history, and, as Spies-Gans suggests, a dramatisation of the subservient position Servières herself occupied: she had written repeatedly to the French government that year, requesting a ...”

“... who comprised the bulk of the parliamentary party. ‘It was the biggest internal fight since Jo Grimond defeated the Hayekians [in the 1960s],’ the former Lib Dem MP David Howarth told me. ‘The whole thing was in aid of a right-wing takeover of the party.’The Orange Book was a public relations disaster. The Labour Party accused the Lib Dems of ...”

“... Shaw, with his enormous output and variety of skills and interests, offers more scope than most. J.L. Wisenthals monograph deals with one such interest, studiously examining the backgrounds of Ceasar and Cleopatra, Saint Joan, and In Good King Charles’s Golden Days, and extending the discussion to many other plays. He ...”

“... it might be funniest if gangsters did have just these conversations, and why shouldn’t they? Richard Nixon and his aides turned out to talk exactly like the President Philip Roth had invented in Our Gang. Tarantino wrote Natural Born Killers after True Romance and before Reservoir Dogs. He says he hasn’t seen the Oliver Stone movie, and while we may ...”

“... in clogs and woollen skirt’ who took up arms and walked out fearlessly to confront her king and restore him to his throne. One of the many verses goes: Fiers enfants de la Lorraine Des montagnes à la plaine, Sur nous, plane ombre sereine, Jeanne d’Arc, vierge souveraine! Marjorie Annan Bryce in a Suffragette procession to mark George V’s ...”

“... it’s clear that Fanon was aware, in 1957, of how Abane had died – lured to a meeting with the king of Morocco, stopped on the road by his FLN rivals, strangled to death. When Fanon’s newspaper, months later, pictured Abane as ‘dead on the field of honour’ – when it declared that he had been wounded in a firefight with the French, and had fought ...”

“... of developments – political turbulence within the House of Saud, centring on the succession of King Fahd; insurgent Wahhabism in the kingdom (with a direct line to the 11 September attacks); signs of a Saudi-Iranian rapprochement; the new assertiveness of other OPEC powers; the dismal findings of the Simmons Report, spelling out the declining yields of ...”