“... 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; ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... celebrate a civil partnership in the Palace of Westminster, and his latest book tells the story of James Pratt and John Smith, the last men to be executed for sodomy in Britain. Pratt was a servant and Smith a labourer; both were out of work when they were arrested, and only Pratt knew how to write. Pratt was 32 and Smith forty. Pratt was married with a ...”

“... children at their accession, most of them still in the cradle. (Mary Queen of Scots and her son, James VI, were also to succeed to the Scottish throne as infants.) The Stewarts were plagued by their history of monarchs dying violently and dying young (James I and James III were murdered ...”

“... just as there was to Shakespeare’s choice of a fable that must have resonated uncomfortably with James VI and I’s vision of a reunited island of ‘Great Britain’. By the same token Shakespeare’s more direct engagements with the classical world carried their own ideological freight – and enable a different understanding of the stubborn persistence of ...”