“... it must have been cooking for the British royal family (excepting the joyous interlude of Edward VII). All that would now change, no doubt, if William Rodgers and Prince Charles simultaneously arrived at supreme power: the one wrote for, the other confessedly followed, The Good Food Guide. Even gossip fragments like these are clues to the altered ...”

“... was born in 1872, the son of a professor of medicine in Gröningen. The young man studied Sanskrit, taking his doctorate in 1897, and his idiosyncratic path from there to the European Middle Ages shaped what he did when he arrived. Dutch history had only begun in earnest in the 16th century, so that Holland was late in producing ...”

“... was Archbishop of Armagh, a seat he resigned to another brother, Roland, who was confessor to Edward II of England – no doubt an interesting job to hold where gossip was concerned. And no wonder that JS’s son James not only owned a copy of the coat of arms, framed as a decoration, but had it stamped on the cover of a volume of his poems he had ...”

“... The Horners of Mells commissioned from Munnings and Lutyens a large equestrian statue of their son Edward, but the villagers did not favour the idea of a young horseman riding up the aisle of the church and, finally, the statue was squeezed into the family’s private chapel. It is a pity, perhaps, that so much attention is ...”

“... obtained the money which underpins his political career by disclosing a government secret when a young private secretary; and Mrs Cheveley tells Sir Robert that she will be in the gallery with his incriminating letter to ensure that he commends the rascally Argentine canal scheme to the House. In one way, that may not have been a thousand miles from the ...”

“... in Madonna than in the multinationals. There was always, however, an alternative heritage. The young Marx owed much of his critique of capitalism to the aesthetics of Friedrich Schiller, and aesthetic notions lurk within the political and economic thought of his maturity. If the early Marx opposes industrial capitalism, it is as much because it robs us of ...”

“... in his tense partnership with Conrad – and, in his late thirties, had much to offer the aspiring young. But neither the old guard nor les jeunes quite saw him as ‘the real right thing’. Conrad made use of him but never really thought that he belonged in the big league. James, if pressed, would have called him slapdash, unreliable, too vulgarly worried ...”

“... And though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not deter Jean Edward Smith from publishing a massive new Grant (2001), which some politicians have been reading with furtive pleasure because it finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt than had been believed. The Conservative pundit Richard Brookhiser gave us ...”

“... There are two pieces about the Titanic, two about the Lusitania and two on the abdication of Edward VIII. Considering what MacArthur omits, repetitions are irritating. (There is also a repeated typo. You may wonder who Sylvia Pankhurt is. There are Pankhursts in my family and we tend to spell it with the ‘s’.) Obviously space is limited, and whether ...”

“... Meanwhile another set of directors and actors turned to Ibsen for quite different reasons. The young Aurélien Lugné-Poe hated naturalism and devised a new theatrical idealism that revelled in high poetic meaning and rarefied expressions. But, like his naturalist enemies, he chose Ibsen to showcase his movement. Vsevolod Meyerhold opposed ...”

“... same time, many physicians over-reached themselves. Rival teams of doctors argued in court over Edward Davies’s manifest antipathy to his mother and whether it was delusional, one side claiming, as Suzuki has it, that she was ‘a nice mother, full of maternal love’, the other that Davies ‘had good reason to react angrily, implying that the mother was ...”

“... in Pomerania, he responded by saying that if it did, he would call the police. Enter the reformers Edward Cardwell and Hugh Childers, secretaries of state for war respectively in Gladstone’s first and second administrations (1868-74 and 1880-1885). Their ideas ran well beyond the improvement of the regular army itself, much though they achieved in that ...”

“... these tend to be men who once worked as juniors in his office, having been hand-picked at a very young age. Douglas Alexander became Brown’s researcher and speechwriter when he was in his early twenties. So did Ed Miliband. Ed Balls joined Brown when he was only 27, after a spell at the Financial Times, and they have been joined at the hip ever ...”

“... of nuance and possibility. The term ‘girl’ was originally gender-neutral, meaning simply ‘young person’: the first recorded use of the word in English comes from a poem of around 1300 which describes a crowd of ‘gurles and men’ thronging a London street. Similarly, ‘Mrs’ did not become fixed as the title of a married woman until the mid-19th ...”

“... wanting to change career, was accepted by nursing school, and our family – the two of us, two young boys, a middle-aged dog – suddenly had to move house. We were leaving Seattle, where we had lived for a decade, a city with ample rain, though one within range of volcanoes and earthquakes, for a small town in the mountains of southern Oregon. I put the ...”