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“... to look at one of the surviving copes from the set of vestments given to Westminster Abbey by Henry VII. Anthony Symondson has written about its subsequent history in a piece in the Catholic Herald and how, via a 17th-century second-hand dealer in London and the Catholic college at St Omer, it eventually ended up at Stonyhurst. The vestments were designed ...”

“... baked beans, cling peaches and custard powder, the staples of such occasions, and which, as Clive James noted, will later be distributed among the poor and devout old ladies who contributed them in the first place. A truer symbol of the locality’s harvest would, I suppose, be a sheaf of emails or a roll of print-outs, electronics round here more profitable ...”

“... the grave. Also excluded from the original edition were, for example, William Jardine and Sir James Matheson, the founders of the famous company which bear their name. Their refusal to agree to Chinese requests to desist from the opium trade led to the disgraceful Opium War of 1840-2, a war which Jardine suggested could be brought to an end by a simple ...”

“... her own past, however honestly or dishonestly’. As is the literary history of Westerns: Henry Nash Smith’s classic Virgin Land is redolent of New Deal optimism, Robert Warshow’s much anthologised essay ‘The Westerner’ is a précis of Cold War concerns, Leslie Fiedler’s Return of the Vanishing American rescripts the West in countercultural ...”

“... sailed from Cherbourg on the Titanic. Kate Phillips was 19 and pregnant by her wealthy employer, Henry Morley. He, too, had abandoned his wife and sailed with his lover under the name of Mr and Mrs Marshall. He died, she was saved, and the surviving daughter is campaigning to have Henry Morley legally identified as her ...”

“... to a wised-up, historical awareness like Muldoon’s. Neither General Jeffrey Amherst nor Colonel Henry Bouquet can stomach the willow-tobacco the Indians offer. And in return They gave us six fishhooks and two blankets embroidered with smallpox. The disorientations Muldoon stores up here, and unleashes in the poem’s final word, resonate throughout ...”

“... recipe for Coca-Cola. And she formed a corporate board ready to go to war with Quest and LabCorp: Henry Kissinger; Sam Nunn, who had served as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee; George Shultz, the former secretary of state, one of the begetters of the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war; William Perry, the former US secretary of defence; ...”

“... passion for it that, from Edward II on, English kings tried to ban it. Edward III, Richard II and Henry IV all passed edicts against it (it was getting in the way of archery and other martial pursuits). In 1457, James II of Scotland decreed that ‘fute-ball and golfe be utterly cryed down’, while ...”

“... 1972, five burglars were caught trying to plant a bug. The group comprised an electronics expert, James McCord, and four Cuban-Americans from Miami. It didn’t take the police and the FBI long to discover that McCord was the security co-ordinator for the Campaign to Re-Elect the President, known by its acronym – at once sinister and hapless – CREEP. The ...”

“... and Dick, but they were advised by a succession of highly talented managers. And then there was Henry Clay Frick, who became a friend, client and partner of the Mellons in the 1870s and remained one for thirty years. In their joint ventures – and there were many – one suspects that Frick, not the Mellons, was the dominant partner. While the Mellon ...”

“... by contrast, was inhabited by giants, notably the ‘great triumvirate’ of John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, as well as eloquent spokesmen on both sides of the slavery question, such as Stephen Douglas and William Seward. John Quincy Adams didn’t consider it beneath him to serve in the House after his term as president. Such men offer a ...”

“... she enjoyed – if that’s the right word – the adulation of the crowds and an audience with James I. She was not, in fact, a princess, however much it suited the Virginia Company to pretend she was. Nor was her name Pocahontas, which means ‘playful girl’ and like so many other aspects of Indigenous culture had been misunderstood. Yet the name is a ...”

“... celebrations last year for another milestone of Stuart English prose composition, the King James Bible, and although I was surprised by the large amount of public interest shown in that commemoration, I doubt whether the Prayer Book will have such an impact. Many will regard it simply as a tribal occasion for a particular Christian denomination, and so ...”

“... and equal inclusion within imperial frameworks before rejecting them altogether. The Jamaican James Williams, a former slave, used imperial justice against the repressive ‘apprentice’ system that persisted after the abolition of slavery; the Indian liberal Dadabhai Naoroji criticised ‘un-British rule’ in the hope of realising the economic ...”

“... That bloody woman!’ James Hamilton-Paterson’s mother was not given to outbursts. Then in her eighties, she had worked in the National Health Service for most of her life. But when she came across the three teenage girls (they might have been her own granddaughters) sitting on cardboard and begging in Victoria Station, something gave way ...”