“... second, until she and her family, long suspected of plots against the regime, were destroyed. The French ambassador said she was ‘above eighty years old’ when Henry VIII had her beheaded, while the Imperial ambassador said she was ‘nearly ninety’. In fact she was 67. The chronology defeated observers, as if her life stretched back into a fabulous era ...”

“... George Scott (to whom Hugh MacDiarmid would dedicate A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle) and a French lecturer at Glasgow University called Denis Saurat (who is often credited with giving the 1920s Scottish literary renaissance its name). Most important, ‘in the early winter of 1918 I met Willa Anderson … My marriage was the most fortunate event in my ...”

“... Abrams, Ahmed Chalabi, Ayad Allawi, Rick Santorum, Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, Richard Armitage, Katherine Harris, Ken Mehlman, Paul O’Neill, Rush Limbaugh. Barely appearing at all are John Ashcroft, Samuel Alito, Ari Fleischer, Alberto Gonzales, Denny Hastert, John Negroponte and Tom Ridge. Condi and Colin Powell are given small parts, but Rummy is ...”

“... of William Drummond; the Dublin of James Shirley; the Wales of Morgan Llwyd, Henry Vaughan and Katherine Philips; the Munster of Roger Boyle; the Edinburgh of Sir George Mackenzie and William Cleland; the Derry of William Philips. Its historical scope is just as broad. After a final chapter on Daniel Defoe’s activities in Edinburgh in 1706-7, where he ...”

“... whenever I have thought with great care of a prose paragraph, I have framed it in my mind in French, or more rarely in Latin, and have then translated into English; whereas whenever it was a matter of such attempts at verse as I have made, my thinking has been done exclusively in colloquial English. When, on the other hand, it has been a matter of ...”

“... that Jane was at Anne Boleyn’s side on the cross-Channel trip of 1532, when the English and French courts met, and when, detained in Calais by storms at sea, Anne eventually went to bed with Henry. Jane may have been with the queen when Elizabeth was born, and when she suffered two miscarriages, but we don’t know what Jane thought about any of ...”

“... lovely curly hair … You were also rather dirty, which I rather liked, too … Well, I think I’ll have to write my memoirs, just to set things straight. In his letter remembering their first meetings Lowell returned to the image of water. ‘But the fact is we were swimming in our young age, with the water coming down on us, and we were gulping.’ In ...”

“... to Badminton School in Bristol to prepare for a second attempt. According to her biographer Katherine Frank, her ‘name was entirely absent from the school magazine’. But she was noticed by Iris Murdoch, a precocious prefect and editor of the magazine, who remembered her as ‘very unhappy, very lonely, intensely worried about her father and her ...”

“... dark in appearance, teensiest hint of a moustache – a cross between Mme Moller (high school French teacher) and a slightly defective but still gorgeous Audrey Hepburn. More femme than butch in style (favours flowing chitons, the odd bangle, funny sandals with lots of straps) but good too at outdoorsy things, such as pounding in tent pegs and spotting ...”

“... Who was the Earl of Antrim? He was the Irish Catholic, Randall McDonnell, who had married Katherine, the widow of the Duke of Buckingham and herself a Catholic convert. Until moving to Ireland late in 1638 with her new husband, the Duchess occasionally carried messages between Archbishop Laud and the Papal agent at the Court of Henrietta Maria, George ...”

“... mocker of forms in religion as in all else. You might, at court, publicly defend before Henry and Katherine of Aragon the daring of Erasmus’s new translation of the New Testament, having long ago aligned yourself with Colet and with Erasmus in the search for the true meaning of the Greek. A propos, you might deal out to monks, friars and retardataire clergy ...”

“... between us, Mr Burke,’ replied the Doctor, in an equally authoritative tone – ‘and I’ll give you an answer. There Sir! By the EYE! I should have looked at him thus Sir thus!’ Burke instantaneously averted his head, and, making no reply, evidently acknowledged this basiliskan authority. As Porter notes, the ranks of madhouse keepers included ...”

“... involvement as an intermediary in the marriage negotiations between Mary Mountjoy, daughter of the French Protestant family with whom Shakespeare lodged near the Barbican in 1604, and their apprentice, Stephen Belott (who subsequently obliged Shakespeare to testify in a lawsuit over the non-payment of £60 supposedly promised to him as a dowry). Beyond this at ...”

“... were protected.’ When her mother, Mary Kate, drew the talent of her daughter to the attention of Katherine Miller, a white woman for whom she cleaned house, Simone found her first patron. Miller paid for the piano lessons which the Waymon family couldn’t afford and steered the child at the age of five to Muriel Mazzanovich (‘Miss Mazzy’), the British ...”

“... Morgan Williams from Glamorgan, who became an innkeeper in Putney, lucked out when he married Katherine Cromwell, the elder sister of the Thomas Cromwell who went on to become Henry VIII’s great minister. Morgan’s son Richard entered his uncle’s service and changed his name to Cromwell in 1529. (Occasionally Oliver referred to himself as ‘Cromwell ...”