“... dry Tobacco in’. ‘Great Iulius Commentaries lies and rots,’ the poet and waterman John Taylor wrote, ‘as good for nothing but stoppe mustard pots.’ Sir William Cornwallis kept ‘pamphlets and lying-stories and two-penny poets’ in his privy, and many texts were ‘pressed into general service’, as Margaret Spufford put it in Small Books and ...”

“... but, like so many others, could not resist baiting him. (‘Here comes the bear to be baited,’ Charles II is reported to have said, seeing Hobbes approach.) What is needed, says Oldenburg, is a telescope capable of looking into the next world, and demonstrating the existence of a life after death. ‘But I do not digress into this point for fear of ...”

“... one-time Lilac Princess at school, millionaire biographer of Jacqueline Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra, looks not all that different from her current subject. There is the same bright, taut face which a good surgical lift always ensures, the same immaculately-dyed and coiffeured hair, the same fixed smile exhibiting the kind of teeth that ...”

“... each other, and I recognised the not-quite-extraterrestrial, dumpy, middle-aged forms of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton panting their way up the hill. The glow was not, of course, from their outward perfection, nor their inner beauty and wisdom, but the result of years and years of attention from precision-ground lenses and high-wattage lights being ...”

“... only one or two bees per bonnet. The Pevsnerian approach was different.In a witty essay, Michael Taylor, who drove Pevsner round Warwickshire, recalls the experience as stimulating and slightly nightmarish, ‘like viewing a video of a thousand years … of history … fast-forwarded’. Pevsner ‘robbed the word “specialist” of its meaning by being a ...”

“... It was pressed and distributed by two young LA-based ‘fringe-of-record-business-hustlers’, Dub Taylor and Ken Douglas, who went on to become major players in the bootleg market. They were wholesaling the records at $4.50 apiece, and they were doing brisk business, only slightly hampered by the fact that neither of them owned a car. In the first few weeks ...”

“... Immediately above lived the widow of Richard Wright, author of Native Son. Above above, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, known to outsiders as Le Corbusier. At the end of the courtyard, the house – la maison – and this calls for historical extrapolation. At some moment in the latter half of the 17th century, la maison came into the possession of Marie ...”

“... other, literally, in an attempt to describe him. ‘The chairman, as he likes to be called,’ Charles McCabe wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle, ‘looks like your genial host at the neighbourhood delicatessen.’ Dorothy Kilgallen, who was earlier seen almost to have caused an international incident by ridiculing Mrs Khrushchev’s choice of evening ...”

“... to the Crown and its courtiers, ‘projectors’ also gained political cover. In the run up to Charles III’s coronation, the Guardian flourished its discovery of a document recording Edward Colston’s grant to William III of shares in the Royal African Company, which shipped more enslaved people across the Atlantic than any other organisation. It was an ...”

“... page of Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four, Brian Epstein and his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, behold the Beatles for the very first time. It is November 1961, in a ‘dank and damp and smelly’ Liverpool basement, and the young band are loud, foul-mouthed, almost purposefully unprofessional.After the show, ...”

“... inhabitants. ‘In other countries dynasties are episodes in the history of the people,’ A.J.P. Taylor wrote in his 1941 history of the monarchy; ‘in the Habsburg Empire peoples are a complication in the history of the dynasty.’ The new ‘modern’ political morality wanted something quite different: bonds of deep identification that could tie rulers ...”

“... and frequently paralysis of the writing arm or, as we would say, repetitive strain injury. Charles Lamb records in ‘The Superannuated Man’ the misery of his years in Mincing Lane as a writer for the EIC. He became haunted by a sense of incapacity for business: ‘I had perpetually a dread of some crisis, to which I should be found unequal. Besides ...”

“... him. (And no, we do not get told whose idea it was to call him Kingsley – some thing to do with Charles of that name, we conjecture, or perhaps it was Henry, C’s black-sheep brother, a figure whose curriculum vitae reads very like some of those that Amis has in store for us: pissed all the time, terrific sponger, no good at writing novels, and so on.) We ...”

“... Impostors ranged from George Psalmanazar, the counterfeit Formosan, to the ‘social monster’ Charles Price, ‘otherwise Bolingbroke, otherwise Johnson, otherwise Parks, otherwise Wigmore, otherwise Brank, otherwise Wilmott, otherwise Williams, otherwise Schutz, otherwise Polton, otherwise Taylor, otherwise Powel, &c ...”

“... in 1981, Costas-Gavras had made Missing, about the disappearance of the American journalist Charles Horman following the coup – a crime which Guzmán has since had to investigate judicially. Practically nobody drops litter in Santiago’s or Valparaiso’s crowded main streets. A train arrives every two minutes on the capital’s spotless ...”