“... as a whole. As Cleopatra says of the messenger who reports on Octavia, ‘The man has seen some majesty and should know.’ But these people felt no awe and registered no majesty. One struggles to find in other arts analogies to this absurd situation, in which people who have not in any genuine sense read Shakespeare (and ...”

“... first baffled by the worship Christians accord to ‘this ugly emaciated man’ ... ‘devoid of majesty, bereft of outward beauty, so wretchedly miserable’. A renegade monk in Mexico (unmissable echoes here of The Power and the Glory) tells him that Christ ‘understands the hearts of the wretched, because His entire life was wretched ... He was not in ...”

“... in for a huge amount of racist and sexist abuse on social media and in the mainstream press, and her appearance in a BBC documentary about the Nazis was objected to on grounds of her vocal pro-Palestine politics. Many of Jones and Sarkar’s critics attempt to reduce their views to their identities, as a gay man and woman ...”

“... had always been, in the female world of home and family. What is new about Robson’s argument is her contention that for many well-to-do men the image of perfect childhood, lost and desired, remained feminine. The image of the girl came to embody a longing for their own primary selves, before the competitive and materialistic values of the Victorian ...”

“... seeking profit by exposing others to its evil power be reconciled with the decrees of heaven?’ Her Majesty had no reply; but holding the high moral ground did not protect Qing China from the Royal Navy, which sank the Emperor’s fleet of war junks with only one British sailor being grazed by a stray Chinese cannonball, and followed up by blockading ...”

“... now-dead she-eminence. The most beautiful photo I downloaded was one that Peter Hujar took of her in the 1970s, around the time of I, Et Cetera. She’s wearing a thin grey turtleneck and lies on her back – arms up, head resting on her clasped hands and ...”

“... and charting previously unmapped territory. The metaphors of exploration which abound in her own writings are not, therefore, merely rhetorical devices. Thirty years ago Ramon Lull’s philosophical output was a ‘huge un-climbed mountain’ and she was planning ‘a, reconaissance expedition searching out new routes for some future attempt on the ...”

“... them. Cleopatra is back in vogue, as a handful of recent biographies attest, and now the rest of her dynasty has been given the same attention in three new accounts: Guy de la Bédoyère’s The Fall of Egypt and the Rise of Rome, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones’s The Cleopatras and Toby Wilkinson’s The Last Dynasty. Bédoyère, the most conventional and ...”

“... seen it all before, the snooping anti-monarchist with the new tie, so she simply passed me to her husband, who asked if a novelist wrote books. As often with the duke, his question lay somewhere between existential brilliance and intergalactic dunce-hood. I merely smiled in imitation of his lovely wife. Prince Philip is a pure catch for a ...”

“... Thomas Odam, do here before God acknowledge and confess that I have grievously offended the divine majesty of almighty God in living incestuously with my wife’s daughter.’ Odam had to repeat this public act of shame on the third Sunday, the first of August, in the loveliest of all English cathedrals, ‘the church of St Andrew in Wells’, ‘wearing in ...”

“... to a big Silicon Valley campaign fundraiser for HRC. (Don’t ask, don’t tell.) Yes: Her Herness Herself! A friendly little plush-covered gathering for six hundred at some well-connected Palo Alto dweller’s farcically supersized manse! The next best thing to a private audience with the Hilldebeest! The Many-Horned Hillaria! (Bernie ...”

“... not expect to become queen – or ‘female king’ (rex femina) as she was known in several of her many lands. After observing the ravages of the War of the Spanish Succession, Charles VI issued the Pragmatic Sanction, an edict which aimed to ensure that his (as yet unborn) children – even his daughters – would stand in line to inherit his kingdoms. He ...”

“... best known as a filmmaker, but she is also a digital and performance artist, as well as a writer. Her 2009 Venice Biennale installation, Eleven Heavy Things, featured a series of interactive steel and fibreglass sculptures. One piece included three pedestals labelled ‘The Guilty One’, ‘The Guiltier One’, ‘The Guiltiest One’, arranged in ascending ...”

“... visits to the USA is accompanied by an allusive anecdote about the behaviour towards her of the Iranian Ambassador in Washington, Ardeshir Zahedi. Some visitors to the London Embassy at Princes Gate emerge not only unscathed but even unmentioned. And accompanying the volume as it reached me was a press release (so-called) from the ...”

“... and perhaps then not fully conscious, for it was not an easy period.’ So she wrote in 1977, in her foreword to these memoirs. But the memoirs themselves, written mainly between 1929 and 1939, open on a grimmer note: ‘Only now as I near the end do I remember my childhood without any bitterness.’ The shadow over ...”