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“... was a false impression too. She was witty and tough. She teased Dr Johnson for not being ‘a young buck’, and she was ready – almost unprompted – to repeat yet again the story of how she had hidden Prince Charles Edward Stuart in the summer of 1746, almost thirty years before, and smuggled him across the sea from ...”

“... 13th, 14th and 15th centuries. On the two occasions when competent and ruthless kings rebuilt it (Edward III, then Henry V), infuriatingly self-indulgent kings lost it (Richard II, then Henry VI). The uselessness of the two latter monarchs had led to their murder by ambitious would-be replacements; nobility had been so unimpressed by the ...”

“... a radio interview with a sixth-former who had been invited by the United Nations to take part in a young people’s conference on the state of the planet. She announced that her concern was to right the mess (war, Third World poverty, ecological catastrophe, global capitalism) that her parents had made of the world. It was a moment before, astonished, I ...”

“... one of her own Plantagenet relations. She is the daughter of a duke and the niece of two kings, Edward IV and Richard III. On her wrist, emblematic, is a small barrel. Her father was Shakespeare’s ‘false, fleeting, perjured Clarence’, who died in the Tower of London at the age of 29, attainted for treason and supposedly drowned in a butt of ...”

“... Comedy, for instance, seeks its material in untimely behaviour, an old man falling in love with a young woman (May in December), as in Molière and Chaucer, a philosopher acting like a child, a well person feigning illness. But it is also comedy as a form that brings about the restoration of timeliness through the komos with which such a work usually ...”

“... more transient love affairs: with Costia, the son of her SPD colleague Clara Zetkin, an idealistic young man 15 years her junior; with Peter Levi, her defence counsel in a spectacular political trial – they had a brief and intense affair in 1914; and Hans Diefenbach, the doctor with whom she conducted her ‘last romantic affair’ in her letters from ...”

“... and turning against the imperial institution, as well as himself, Hirohito was unmoved. Konoe’s young assistant and my subsequent long-time friend Tsunoda Jun blamed Hirohito’s courtiers, probably very unfairly, for the failure, and for Konoe’s subsequent suicide – not avenged until his grandson Hosokawa Morihiro became prime minister in ...”

“... He did not, like Bulwer Lytton, lock his wife in a lunatic asylum. He did not die tragically young like the Brontës or poor, like Charles Lever. He did not become Prime Minister of England, like Disraeli. Unlike the barren Hardy, he was happily married and left two respectable sons to carry on his name. Trollope wrote more fiction than most and must ...”

“... had survived the war and its nature underlines the degree to which she identified with the dead young men she wrote about in her autobiography Testament of Youth, which covers the years from her birth in 1893 until her marriage in 1925, but is centrally concerned with her experiences during the Great War, after which she felt herself ‘a haphazard survivor ...”

“... last summer as I sat in the tearoom of Cambridge University Library and eavesdropped. Three very young, very bright, very civilised British historians were discussing a recent work on Dutch history, written by a one-time Cambridge don long since departed to the States. It had been acclaimed by reviewers as a bravura performance. It had been translated into ...”

“... by his son Edmund ‘Ironside’, who fought Svein’s son Knut (King Canute) to a draw, but died young and unexpectedly, possibly of battle wounds, possibly by assassination. The contrast between father and son does further damage to Æthelred’s reputation. Early modern historians claimed that Æthelred should never have acceded to the throne in the first ...”

“... spectral presence of another novel, a gay novel called “Nineteen Forty-Eight”, in which two young Londoners called Winston and Julian fall in love with each other and struggle to sustain their relationship under the continuous threat of blackmail, exposure and arrest.’ He realises, of course, that neither Orwell nor his straight readers had any idea ...”

“... Belgrave Square next door to Prince George, duke of Kent, and duchess of ditto and little Prince Edward. The house is all Regency upstairs with very carefully draped curtains and Madame Récamier sofas and wall paintings. Then the dining room is entered through an orange lobby and discloses itself suddenly as a copy of the blue room at the Amalienburg near ...”

“... straight chair welcoming us to her hilltop blue-green with olive trees in the village of Taybeh, young Doris Salah ministering to dispossessed women at the YWCA, the Beduin boy with the lamb, Sassa who talks too much, motherly ... strong ... devout ... dependable Wadiah, all of the people who took their places on the pages of this book, and gentle Judy ...”

“... Rosen delivers himself of casual observations – on the decline of writing music for the young, on the nature of virtuosity and the pianist’s need to bear pain, Chopin’s ‘irony and wit but not a trace of humour’ – that sparkle with worldly cleverness and long experience. He is just right, I think, in his account of the Romantic tendency to ...”