“... There is an old joke about a man returning to his village after his first trip to the city. ‘The king himself spoke to me,’ he boasts to a rapt audience. ‘What did he say?’ they gasp. ‘He said, he actually said, directly, to me, and I was as close as I am to you … he said: “Get out of my way, peasant!”’ And we have to suppose that if the ...”

“... Bucharest, Weber was sent to school in England, served in the Second World War as a captain in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, and in the course of his service spent the mid-1940s in India, after earlier stints in Belgium and Germany. Demobilised in 1947, he went to Cambridge, and devoted the rest of his life to history, mostly French history. He ...”

“... Tichborne estate): ‘Never was there a trial in England, I believe, since that memorable trial of Charles I, which has excited more the attention of Englishmen and the world than this.’ It is as though the establishment of someone’s identity was the most difficult and most crucial task that a court could undertake. McWilliam has fun with the overblown ...”

“... Olivier and Sidney Webb, the military expert Lord Thomson, and Noel Buxton, Viscount Haldane, Charles Trevelyan and Josiah Wedgwood, all recent converts from the Liberal Party. Disconcertingly for some, present too were Lord Parmoor, a former Unionist MP, and Viscount Chelmsford, who, although a Conservative, agreed to serve as first lord of the ...”

“... too good or too bad to need defending; it’s guaranteed that anyone willing to read a volume on King Crimson, say, or Crosby, Stills and Nash, is already on board. Then there is the curse of Dylanology, such a blight on pop criticism: worship of lyrics as ‘poetry’, modelled on pop’s least representative major figure. This sort of writing fails the ...”

“... of the brightest, Major Dwight Eisenhower, retreated to Washington after a few years. The oddest, Charles Willoughby, who had begun life as Karl von Tscheppe-Weidenbach, was the son of a German father and an American mother. A fussy one-time historian with a thick accent and pince-nez on a silk cord, he became MacArthur’s intelligence chief, and stayed ...”

“... a windfall of new evidence, but Mr Holden is too courtly (his previous subjects include Prince Charles and the Queen Mum) to name it. He merely says demurely that he persuaded Olivier’s friend, their shared publisher Lord Weidenfeld, that – how does he put it? – ‘between them [Olivier’s] two books did not add up to a comprehensive, let alone ...”

“... fabrication that the saint, almost certainly Greek, was actually the daughter of the British king Coel. The book features the sort of young woman you might find in Angela Brazil, given to saying such things as ‘What a lark! What a sell!’ Converted as an old lady to the new religion, she conceives the duty of her piety to be the discovery and ...”

“... that won’t make him feel like a coward. In his introduction to Edwin Arlington Robinson’s King Jasper, he quotes a couplet from Robinson’s ‘Flammonde’ – ‘One pauses half afraid/To say for certain that he played’ – and adds: his much-admired restraint lies wholly in his never having let grief go further than it could in play. So far shall ...”

“... thinking: ‘I bet I will be, though.’Racing drivers make the worst road drivers, we were told. Charles Leclerc doesn’t know how to park. (There are entire social media threads devoted to pictures of the Formula One driver parking badly: just search Reddit for ‘Charles Leclerc v. parking his car’.) Someone asked ...”

“... Ireland, a position in which he served two seven-year terms. Duffy was the son of Young Irelander Charles Gavan Duffy, who was arrested for sedition on the eve of the 1848 Rebellion, but not convicted. In 1855, disappointed with the progress of the Tenants’ Right Party, which he had founded and represented at Westminster, ...”

“... trapdoor with his fist.‘Where the devil are you driving us?’‘Charing Cross, sir.’‘I said King’s Cross! Round you spin, and drive like blazes, or we miss our train! There’s one to York at 10.35,’ added Raffles as the trapdoor slammed; ‘we’ll book there, Bunny, and then we’ll slope through the subway to the Metropolitan, and so to ground ...”

“... and in 1900 returned to the Congo, part of which was under the direct control of Leopold II, King of the Belgians. He began to investigate allegations of brutality in the region; his work was thorough and conscientious, and he was personally responsible for the decision of the Foreign Office to undertake a serious investigation of what was happening in ...”

“... cases this was her father: we might think of Christine de Pizan, whose father was astrologer to Charles V of France, or Damaris Masham, whose father was Ralph Cudworth, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge from 1645. Anna Maria Van Schurman began her Latin tract on Women’s Aptitude for Knowledge and Higher Learning (or, as the English translation ...”

“... 1820. By this point, only around eighty American novels had been published, and the best known was Charles Brockden Brown’s macabre Edgar Huntley (1799), although Washington Irving’s collection of short stories and vignettes, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., would prove immensely popular the year Smith made his jibe. (Like Cooper after ...”