“... the more aristocratic foreign visitors to London’, making it sound like something out of a Henry James novel. Newnham-Davis wrote that Mrs Myra Washington dined there, an American who knew ‘most people who are worth knowing in Europe’. As she sat at her table, her ‘cream-coloured miracle of a dress’ was reflected in all the mirrors. What​ explains ...”

“... rawness) both bring a shift in the balance not so much of power as of need between the partners. James Cellan Jones’s direction made the most of the battle scenes too. Manning herself hadn’t seen front-line military action, but she knew people who had, and came closer to it than a lot of men who actually served. Besides, war is as much a subject for the ...”

“... omits.Crippen, meanwhile, was turning into a spiv. By early 1894, he had started working for James Monroe Munyon, a ‘professor’ – the title was his own – who made his fortune selling ‘Munyon’s Remedies’, which he advertised as ‘a cure for every disease’. Crippen was soon transferred to the head office in Philadelphia, where he was one ...”

“... Balzac’s significance in the history of the novel was fully apparent by 1905, when Henry James said that his ‘achievement remains one of the most inscrutable, one of the unfathomable, final facts in the history of art’. Of course, not all Balzac’s contemporaries agreed on the quality of the work; some complained that his prose was often ...”

“... and nobody was grave-faced about it. His most memorable poems are fanciful squibs like ‘The King of the Crocodiles’ that hover on the brink of inspired nonsense. When the war was over and a wave of political protests began – really a resumption of the protests of the 1790s – Southey took an indecently hard line on restricting the freedom of the ...”

“... opposition, an elegant William Pitt rides the shoulders of the bloated-looking, nonsense-spouting King. John Bull, objecting to war with Revolutionary France in the 1798 ‘TREASON!!!’, farts into the unmistakably unhappy face of His Royal Highness. Like other caricaturists in the orbit of the French Revolution, Newton made scatology a subversive ...”

“... still a strong psychological barrier against its conversion into political opposition. The ‘good king, bad advisers’ idea retained a surprising currency. This view is broadly confirmed by Marifeli Pérez-Stable, who, in The Cuban Revolution, concludes that the Cuban Government retained an undetermined level of popular support. For many citizens, breaking ...”

“... College, the site of his earlier joke about the horse that goes round and round the statue of King Billy on College Green. Apart from its obvious use as an image of political paralysis, the obsessive circular motion refers us back to Ferguson again, who wrote an essay ‘On the Ceremonial Turn, Called Desiul’. This is the Irish word ...”

“... agonising over his situation so much as living out a key scene from Mr Smith Goes to Washington: James Stewart’s character alternately represented his ‘naive’ opponents Voorhis and McGovern, and his own idealistic self. Nixon’s most dreamlike performance came four days before Christmas 1970, when Elvis Presley (who’d written the president a ...”

“... inhabitants of that same country, and not only in England. Across the Channel they wondered why a king should choose to marry his mistress. (The whole point is, however, that Anne never was Henry’s mistress, whereas her sister Mary was. When Henry was accused of having slept not only with Anne’s sister but with her mother, he disarmingly ...”

“... if sedition were being brewed on their premises. This was a significant threat: shortly after the king backed down from his banning order, several proprietors were arrested for continuing to permit ‘seditious discourses, and spreading false and seditious news’. Until the end of Charles II’s reign, and beyond, London’s coffee houses continued to be ...”

“... as part of the celebrations of Caesar’s triumph in 46 BC. In modern French culture, as Anthony King has emphasised (in a recent supplement to the Journal of Roman Archaeology), Vercingetorix has become a national hero for both Left and Right. In World War Two, for example, he did double duty as ‘the first resistance fighter in our history’ and as a ...”

“... the best he could find, including Kenny Everett and Steve Wright in the UK, and Howard Stern, king of the shock-jocks, in the US. All three were wacky, eccentric rule-breakers, and in the case of Everett and Stern risqué by the standards of their contemporaries. But Moyles saw that this wasn’t what made them so successful. Their secret was their ...”

“... the moon. No one in Eastern Europe thought we did. They thought it was just Cold War bullshit.’ James Earl Ray, killer of Martin Luther King Jr, obviously had help from the establishment, as did John Wilkes Booth, who did away with Lincoln. As Finn says, not everyone believes that Booth was really gunned down eleven days ...”

“... facing certain death – watching their comrades sail away, yet bravely cheering ‘God Bless the King!’ It’s no surprise that The Wager is being made into a film by Martin Scorsese: it already reads like one (Killers of the Flower Moon is based on an earlier book by Grann).These impressive effects rely on some writerly liberties. The demands of the ...”