“... Charles explained; I ‘newar sawe woman soo wyepe’. On their return they had to face Henry. ‘Hall me trost es in you,’ the duke wrote to Wolsey. It had to be, since untangling his rich bride’s finances was ‘past me lerneng’. It’s impossible to say how much of Henry’s anger was for show. He was determined the crown should be the financial ...”

“... winning was important to Britten, whether it was a game of cards or the building of a new concert hall, a tennis match or the staging of an opera. Criticism was intolerable to him. Britten had the misfortune to be born with a talent so much greater than that of his competitors that winning came fatally easily. Now this is plain to see. W.H. Auden saw it at ...”

“... and statues of the Fonte Gaia, the municipal fountain that originally stood opposite the town hall in Siena. Although neither San Petronio nor the Fonte Gaia reflects much interest in the antique Roman architecture, ornament and figure style that so absorbed leading Florentine sculptors at the time, the tomb chest on which the effigy of Ilaria lies is ...”

“... of the classical canon on record with the experience of modern performances live in the concert hall to get the point. Without Rosenthal’s performances of Chopin, or Artur Balsam’s Mozart, early Menuhin, the Budapest String Quartet, Klemperer conducting Mahler or Furtwängler conducting Brahms, I think our sense of what ‘aura’ in music might ...”

“... since last year marked the 250th anniversary of his death, he is guaranteed to feature on every hall and church programme. There is also a vast outpouring of Bach recordings, which, until DGG curtailed the series, included John Eliot Gardiner’s amazing cantata performances. One of these took place every week for a year ...”

“... efficiently.’Energy policy stuck closely to this philosophy in the 1990s and 2000s, under John Major and Tony Blair, but subsequent governments abandoned it. Major reforms in the mid-2010s under David Cameron introduced subsidies for renewables and for gas-fired power stations. The measures were supposed to be temporary, even before Cameron promised ...”

“... began by aborting Constitutional change and is ending in a state of Constitutional rigor mortis. John Major’s Government contemplates no political evolution whatever on the mainland, as distinct from in Ireland, and advertises this rigidity as ‘defence of the Union’. When it founders, however, such intransigence will be overtaken by long overdue ...”

“... into ‘sixpence’ without any conscious translation. Even a single word could be macaronic: the hall screens appear in one Cambridge record as leskreneum, a French article plus an English (though perhaps French-derived) substantive with a Latin ending. The surviving record of such language mixture is inevitably a written record. We have no evidence of how ...”

“... Institute of Modern Art – and the magistrates’ court on one side, and the gothic town hall alongside grey 1960s council offices on the other. Completing the square are Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Bottle of Notes, a building-height bottle of lacy blue and white steel, teetering on its side, and a giant TV screen that always seemed to ...”

“... is not a later historian’s conceit. It appears to have been coined by the Whig MP John Hampden, grandson of the hero of resistance to Charles I’s ship money, in testimony to a committee of the House of Lords in the autumn of 1689. Hampden was exulting that, in contrast to the Cromwellian revolution of the 1640s and 1650s which his ancestor ...”

“... Johnson’s euphemism for drunk. Getting back after one party, they spent an hour in a heap on the hall floor – ‘Says a lot for the drinks Peter pours.’ On quiet evenings they enjoyed the Benny Hill Show. By the end of their lives Lord and Lady Snow had become a half-comical duo, not at home in a new world (‘the left was going all wrong on the cultural ...”

“... then further fictionalising their situation in The New Machiavelli. The editor of the Spectator, John St Loe Strachey, a pillar of the National Social Purity Crusade (no, really), foamed at the novel’s ‘poisonous and pernicious teaching’, finding it ‘in its essence depraved’ (the book, it should be said, contains no description of sexual activity ...”

“... brought out of storage after the war, they were reinstated in the north-west corner of the Front Hall, where the present gift shop stands. This was not the end of Amaravati’s vicissitudes. By the Fifties, humidity and pollution had again started to erode the marbles. They were packed away and stored in the museum’s basement in atmospherically controlled ...”

“... exhibited Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa as well as dwarfs, Eskimos and so on in the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly (which was later to serve as one of London’s first cinemas). Other French paintings, including a version of David’s Coronation of Napoleon, with its dazzling profusion of documentary details, were shown separately in London in the same ...”

“... like Bolivia or Paraguay. De Gaulle said that Chile was ‘the pilot country of Latin America’. John Gunther wrote in 1967 that Chile was ‘one of the most civilised countries in the world’, and that the general line of government was ‘roughly that of the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt or even the British Labour Party’. There is not a hint of such ...”