“... the grim County Palatine, the capering French lord Monsieur le Bon and the alcoholic nephew of the duke of Saxony, but reserves a special half-contemptuous pity for ‘Falconbridge, the young baron of England’. He is, admittedly, good-looking, but has no proper national dress, wearing instead a German bonnet, an Italian doublet and French hose. Despite this ...”

“... lady’s determination to acquire a famous lover was finally satisfied by a rendezvous with the Duke of Wellington in the corner of a foreign field, near Brussels, in June 1815. Lady Frances’ hectic alternations of lust and shame continued to make her an alarming mistress, as Scrope Davies’s trunk, full of memorabilia, has recently disclosed. Scrope’s ...”

“... myth for the left, but also for the new, postwar right, some of whom hoped to recapture what Boris Johnson calls ‘the Churchill factor’.From the 1960s onwards many ‘revisionist’ historians sought to dismantle this myth. They combed through newly available archives and explicated the logic of the civil servants who had written neat papers explaining why ...”

“... is now determined to avenge its humiliation by the Supreme Court in 2019 when it threw out Boris Johnson’s illegal attempt to prorogue Parliament. Suella Braverman, the attorney general, spoke for Johnson and many others in this Tory cabinet when she proclaimed that ‘we must take back control’ from the ...”

“... the body particularly informative as compared with the real stuff of history, some of the ex-duke of York’s receiver’s accounts, say, or records of Yorkist estate management.The TV programme on Channel 4 was a lengthy and slightly spurious cliffhanger, culminating in the always conjectural reconstruction of what the famous corpse looked like. No ...”

“... ducal palazzo. Here at several points between the 1560s and the 1580s, Pier Francesco Orsini, the duke of Bomarzo, employed the designer Pirro Ligorio and the sculptor Simone Moschino to create what feels like a deeply submerged atavistic otherwhere in the process of manifesting itself above the surface, or the half-buried ruins, of a bizarre lost ...”

“... from his father, William Hazlitt Sr, a notable sermon-writer whose work was published by Joseph Johnson, the publisher of Wordsworth and Blake. Yet the morality of Dissent always seemed to press up against a crisis of belief. The Antinomians in New England made the challenge most plain by asking how far a man or a woman endowed with individual conscience ...”

“... known as The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, Richard Duke of York and All Is True, for example, reappeared as, respectively, Henry VI Parts 2 and 3 and Henry VIII.) Pre-Christian British kings, however, though just as solemnly vouched for by Holinshed’s Chronicles, weren’t seen to count as historical: the play ...”

“... times as many as were previously known, but small compared with those of Swift, Pope, Richardson, Johnson and even Sterne. (In an age which had recently acquired the habit of preserving the private papers of writers on a substantial if haphazard scale, the question of why this wasn’t done by or for Fielding invites study.) Two important correspondences in ...”

“... Club. Just as Dorian was brought by a friend into the smoking room of the Churchill, and ‘the Duke of Berwick and another gentleman got up in a marked manner and went out,’ so, too, as William Rothenstein remembered, when Wilde entered the Hogarth Club ‘an old member of the club, ostentatiously staring at Wilde, rose from his chair and made for the ...”

“... on the nuclear codes?‘J.D. Vance! J.D. Vance!’ the forum chanted.I’ll take that as a yes.Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin senator, complained about ‘biological males competing against girls’. I suspect he will never know how sinister he sounds speaking about ‘girls’, but his transphobic contortions were entertainingly undercut by the public address ...”

“... hubby’s on the critical list,’ mouthed Aunty Kitty. ‘Their eldest girl works for Johnson and Johnson. They’d just got back from Barbados. The nurse is white but she’s not above 18.’ The nurse came in. ‘This is my nephew,’ said Aunty Kitty. ‘Mr Midgley’s son. Your father’s got a room to ...”

“... by Kim Stanley Robinson in his novel Forty Signs of Rain – begins with the Scientists for Johnson Campaign, run by a group of eminent scientists who were worried about Barry Goldwater’s apparent eagerness to wage nuclear war. Their campaign had a considerable impact, and when Richard Nixon got to the White House four years later he was convinced ...”

“... was he? Here, too, comparison is illuminating. Claiming he got on as easily with a dustman as a duke, Proust was in practice a social climber absorbed by the world of titles, whose contact with those in overalls was little more than sexual. He could muse (at least, his French editors surmise towards the end of the First World War, as unrest was ...”

“... buildings and walkways at the base of the tower. He immediately sent a text message to Laura Johnson, the council’s director of housing, and to Holgate. Once he’d got dressed and gone outside he called Robert Black. The streets were full of people and blue lights were flashing everywhere. Black told him he was behind the police cordon on Whitchurch ...”