“... groups of “minorities” ’ – the affirmative action which, he wrongly asserts, Martin Luther King Jr opposed. According to Evans, moreover, the ‘ill-judged 1965 Immigration Reform Act’ – it repealed the restrictive, ethnocentric national origins quotas of the 1924 legislation – transformed the ‘ethnic mix of the country’, as ‘the proportion ...”

“... niece), Katharine. ‘Will’ Fullerton went to Harvard in the 1880s and studied art history under Charles Eliot Norton. Santayana (who wrote him some bawdy letters) and Bernard Berenson were contemporaries. (So he touched on Wharton’s world years before he met her.) He wanted a fellowship but, to his lasting disappointment, he didn’t get one. He travelled ...”

“... Standing on the deck of the sinking Lusitania, the American theatrical manager Charles Frohman spoke his last words. ‘Why fear death?’ he was heard to say. ‘It is the most beautiful adventure in life.’ He may have been echoing J.M. Barrie, whose ‘awfully big adventure’ had only recently chimed with children of all ages ...”

“... and works rather than people. Nostalgia is the be-all-and-end-all of pop, and Morrissey is the king of all that, so when he became a star himself (and began featuring his own mug on his record sleeves) he had succeeded in creating an audience literally after his own image, a tribe inured to the modes and manners of heightened fandom. It therefore seems ...”

“... seems to end with a Phlebas-style death by water (‘Now lies he there/Tip to tip washed beneath Charles’ Wagon’), a fate presented as somewhat preferable to that of the ‘tortured’, just-married protagonist: ‘When the bridegroom smoothed his hair/There was blood upon the bed.’ The line is often taken to refer to the Eliots’ disastrous honeymoon ...”

“... at having connived at his father’s arrest for treason in Nahum Tate’s 1681 acting version of King Lear, Regan whispers to him: ‘The Grotto, Sir, within the lower Grove,/Has Privacy to suit a Mourner’s Thought.’ The next scene duly opens on ‘A Grotto’, where we find ‘Edmund and Regan amorously Seated, Listning to Musick’. But ...”

“... Charlemagne and said: ‘I have come to ask you for what no man wants, the honour of being, oh my King, if God does not forsake me, the man of whom it will be said: It was he who took Narbonne ... I will enter Narbonne and I will be its conqueror. Later, I will punish scoffers, should any remain.’ More radiant than the archangel, Charlemagne said to ...”

“... what used to be the valley of the Fleet River, which flowed into the Thames from the direction of King’s Cross. In 1863, Farringdon became one terminus in the world’s first underground railway, the Metropolitan Railway, the other being Paddington. It’s been running ever since: 142 years of complete strangers squeezed into boxes, propelled under the ...”

“... round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less perilous, I would have thought, to have a leader ...”

“... In Katanga, where the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga – a partnership formed in 1906 between King Leopold II, the Société Générale de Belgique and British interests – demanded a flow of cheap labour to exploit the region’s mineral resources, the government obliged with a series of decrees, in 1906, 1910 and 1933, requiring that each ...”

“... was addressed was in little danger of becoming meaningless. ‘I’m very glad you like Alice,’ Charles Dodgson wrote to Margery Worthington in 1895, ‘but what wicked wicked sisters you have not to let you read it till they go to school! But perhaps the mistress had told them they had to learn a page of it by heart as a lesson?’ Dodgson is toasting the ...”

“... William III’s concerted efforts to purge the monarchy of the taint of libertinism left behind by Charles II’, and so he may well have designed the room ‘with this reformist agenda in mind’. That William would have found Venus ashamed less rather than more exciting than Venus asleep is questionable, but she was at least acknowledging that her behaviour ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... darkest, he concluded, between 1550 and 1849. According to one estimate, when Henry VIII became king in 1509 there were 139 vineyards in England and Wales, all on the verge of steep decline. The impact of lower temperatures was felt across the northern hemisphere. Farmers in the Chinese province of Jiangxi, for instance, found they could no longer grow ...”

“... of trust’. They drew up a ‘black list’ of MPs who had accepted offices and rewards from the king, claiming that this was a conflict of interest. In 1700 and 1701, after the constitutional revolution of 1688, excise and then customs collectors were disqualified from sitting in Parliament for this reason. Earlier, in 1644, Parliament had established an ...”