“... to get there, and the decades of danger and crises were about to end,’ Clinton’s negotiator, Charles Kartman, told the journalist Mike Chinoy. ‘We had this sense that not only a page but an entire chapter of history was turning.’The condition was a visit to Pyongyang by the president himself; it would have been his last significant act in ...”

“... call on anything as formidable as the Metropolitan Police’s Territorial Support Group, the boy king refuses to step ashore. ‘Rough, rude men’ had been sent ‘all over the country’ to gather the iniquitous poll tax and the mood was ugly. Ackroyd mentions the incident, adding that the waters of Deptford ‘refreshed the rebellious followers of Wat ...”

“... Colin Calloway has put it, paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, ‘the vicious pawns of a tyrannical king’. From the perspective of Westminster, the colonials were ungrateful rogue subjects who provoked needless border clashes that strained the Treasury, which had already been exhausted on their behalf in the French and Indian War. In his 1763 ...”

“... Tybalt, I have myself always assumed that since Mercutio with cheerful derision calls his enemy ‘King of Cats’, ‘Prince of Cats’, making allusion to rat-catching and the possession of nine lives; and since furthermore Elizabethans appear to have called their Tom-cats, Tib-cats – then the chances are strong that our still-surviving habit of calling ...”

“... includes a reference to ‘anaesthetic tables’), William James, James Thomson, William Acton, Charles-Louis Philippe, W.R. Burnett (a crime novelist in whose High Sierra – published in 1940 – the phrase ‘She was … a one-night-stand type’ occurs), Edward Winslow Martin (author of The Secrets of the Great City, 1868, which mentions ‘cheap ...”

“... occupied a senior role at Maison Worth, the French fashion house opened by an Englishman, Charles Frederick Worth (a Galliano avant la lettre), though that wasn’t until after her time at Vogue. Worth plays an important part in the Vogue story, though, and in the story of fashion altogether. Le Grand Worth, the first couture auteur, started the ...”

“... called Charlie Laughton whom he first met in a bar (not to be confused with the British actor Charles Laughton). Pacino writes that he ‘knew’ straightaway that Laughton, who worked at the Herbert Berghof Studio, was destined to be his teacher. Laughton, who was described as a ‘sensory’ acting coach, became a father figure to Pacino (he was about ...”

“... the George V Memorial Committee, who wanted to remove it to clear space for a statue of the late king. At the same time as fighting that battle on the correspondence pages, he was also setting up the Georgian Group as a new committee of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. He found the experience arduous, and all the worse thanks to the ...”

“... other words Lou loses her nerve. Most of us do, in the moment, barring extreme cases like Prince Charles. Still, the bear lifted her for a moment and something was exchanged. ‘What had passed to her from him she did not know.’ Here is where I might shake my head and say I don’t know whether this scene could be written now. Well sure it could. Why ...”

“... P. Adams Sitney, who was about to go to Yale. ‘Sitney’s poetic passions that summer included Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, Virgil and Sextus Propertius.’ He also introduced his girlfriend to Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Carolee Schneemann. ‘Her eyes opened wide.’In later years, Acker often said that she had studied linguistics under Roman Jakobson. This ...”

“... by people who know that the spokesman for the original America First movement, 77 years ago, was Charles Lindbergh, an anti-Semite who warmly sympathised with Hitler’s politics. (How many of these people also know that John F. Kennedy was an early supporter of America First?) But the underlying question was not whether Trump was giving a secret signal to ...”

“... of art; but at the time there was lively curiosity and interchange between Paris and London. Charles Deschamps, who sold Henry Hill his pictures, was a patron and friend of Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and later of Whistler. Monet came to London to avoid the Franco-Prussian War, Pissarro to avoid political persecution; both ...”

“... too, that he is a philosopher of profit and loss, of how, as he says elsewhere, in an echo of King Lear, ‘nothing is got for nothing.’ Accordingly, further down the page and in the next paragraph he recalls the dinner and gets round to the cost of it and the price of the assurance it breeds. It is a cost the boys themselves, once grown, will also have ...”

“... Wychwood used to stretch from Woodstock to Burford but now only Blenheim and Cornbury remain. Charles I gave Cornbury to Clarendon and the palatial house was built by the minister after the Restoration. The park is full of army lorries now, but the golden-stoned house looking down on the string of lakes is visible through the medieval oaks, We walked ...”

“... conceded that he did not yet live in ‘an enlightened age’; but thanks to his liberal Prussian king it was at least an ‘Age of Enlightenment’. Kant’s confidence in the ultimate triumph of Enlightenment never wavered, though it took a terrible battering in the remaining twenty years of his life. Frederick the Great died in 1786, to be succeeded by the ...”