“... experiences of royal husbands. They tended, it was felt, either to do too much or too little. Philip of Spain’s marriage to Mary Tudor had brought unwelcome foreign influence, while Queen Anne’s union with the ‘dull-brained, wine-bibing’ George of Denmark inspired little enthusiasm. Neither marriage was in living memory but Albert had arrived at a ...”

“... was in his blood. He didn’t follow his father, Charles, his sister Fanny and his uncle John Philip onto the stage, but he never saw life as other than a drama with himself in the leading role, and no thespian was ever more prone to declamation, posturing and inflammation of the ego. In his view, the Spanish adventure was ‘one of the most important ...”

“... the euro during the current Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in Euroscepticism from Philip Gould’s focus groups and daily readings of the Sun and the Mail, Gordon Brown’s press secretary, Charlie Whelan, and his economic adviser, Ed Balls, sent the Times a fax hinting at a major policy change while Whelan tried to persuade the Sun to go with ...”

“... stodge of an academic thesis, as if its governing spirit emanated from the assembled professors in Ball of Fire. But mostly she keeps in mind how Barbara Stanwyck, in that same movie, perched on the edge of the desk and talked rings around the fuddy-duddies. She would rather sound like that. The bright students who attend her seminars are in luck. It must ...”

“... refused to settle in Vienna; it was a city in which she and her daughters could be invited to a ball without ever being asked to dance. Left to his own devices, Anselm lived quietly in his father’s palaces; he gave a fortune to the new Viennese Jewish community, but prayed mostly at home rather than attending synagogue.Anselm had four sons, one of whom ...”

“... in the ‘disagreeable objects’ of Alberto Giacometti from the early 1930s; his Suspended Ball, a cleft globe hung by a string just above a phallic wedge, retains its ambivalent force to this day.Surrealism had an equally complicated relation to politics. For Breton, subjective liberation was the necessary complement to social ...”

“... first full-length collection, The Dispossessed (1948), shows him trying, like the boy in ‘The Ball Poem’, to learn the ‘epistemology of loss’. The word ‘difficulty’ crops up in three successive poems in the book’s second part. In ‘Caravan’ and ‘The Possessed’ it refers to the loss of childhood certainties; and ‘On the London ...”

“... kind before the war and I could not help referring to it afterwards as the Duchess of Richmond’s Ball.’ Sacha Guitry was to appear with Seymour Hicks in a not very funny sketch they had written, adorned but not improved by Guitry’s latest wife, Genevieve Sereville, an extremely pretty girl. ‘At rehearsal Mlle Sereville was dressed in a very short skirt ...”

“... was yet another husband-murder, so directly competitive with A Warning. From the account books of Philip Henslowe, the owner of the Rose, we learn that the authors received £4 each for the play in late August 1599. On 12 September Henslowe disbursed a further £10 ‘to bye wemen gownes for page of plemoth’, suggesting that performance was imminent (and ...”

“... and being swanky, at the Ritz. But I really like the first part best.’ In a photo taken at a ball in March, Roselyne Béghin, of the sugar fortune, and Sabine de Noailles, whose aunt’s grandmother inspired Proust, are caught mid-chat, eyes closed and mouths open in exclamation, but Bouvier, in a black strapless dress and triple-stranded pearls, manages ...”

“... Miracles of Life, ‘ringed by a barbed-wire fence through which I often climbed to retrieve a ball or kite. Japanese soldiers patrolled the wire in a rather casual way, and once I had to hide in the long grass outside the fence when I was searching for a lost baseball and the other children warned me that the guards were approaching.’ His general ...”

“... Katharine Hepburn. He was with Kate again the year after in Holiday, George Cukor’s version of a Philip Barry play. In 1939 Gunga Din was followed by Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings, with Grant in a sombrero, pantaloons and a flyboy jacket. Apparently at a desolate South American airfield, he might have been dressed by Orry-Kelly. His elegance was as ...”

“... spoken drama. This was the heyday of Romantic theatre, when the first great actor-managers – Philip Kemble, with his brother Charles and their sister Sarah Siddons – transformed the drama. A generation of great actors met a generation of great critics, including Hazlitt, Coleridge and Byron, and the London theatre was a centre of literary and ...”

“... They include Royce Wagoner, Dutch Martell, Peter Komadina, Mr Schuyler Bash and (a real ball of fire) Lieutenant Horace Stepole. Francis Peabody Magoun, on the other hand, is a real name, as is Giorgione, who is footnoted as ‘famous Venetian painter’, presumably to distinguish him from all those other Italian boys who went down on posterity but ...”

“... dock on perambulatory trial for their lives. He is interested in the feelings of the squash ball and the champagne bottle that launches the ship. In a football match his sympathy is not with either of the teams but with the ball or, in a match ending nil-nil, with the hunger of the goalmouth. He would be unable to ...”