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“... so confusing but, great! The singer Morrissey grew up in the Stretford area of Manchester. His mother was a librarian. (‘I was born in Manchester Central Library,’ he later said. ‘The crime section.’) His father is the usual mystery: he liked football and appears not to have been close to his football-ignoring son. He got divorced from ...”

“... the table – and the cards in the drawer. Certainly, that was true of the first Countess Spencer, mother of Georgiana and Harriet. She was conspicuously religious and a compulsive gambler. Up at 5.30 in the morning, she spent an hour at her prayers and a further hour with her Bible. The evenings were spent more congenially, at the gaming table. ‘I staid ...”

“... seated by a cot in which an infant is nibbling, not a lollipop, but a beetroot, while the mother cries: ‘Suck, chéri, suck, your father says it’s sugar.’ War is the mother of invention and we have forgotten that the Emperor was the stern nurse of the beet sugar industry. His 40 factories helped to assuage ...”

“... day the email address kate@facebook.com was still available. As Facebook’s ur-Kate, she was ‘queen of a world in which every other Kate would be derived from my archetype’. While she wrote answers to users’ questions (‘What does “poking” mean?’), she surveyed the kingdom. Fridges were filled with every type ...”

“... of his father’s infidelities and sympathy for him in his quarrels with Rose Kennedy, Jack’s mother; stories about his Fitzgerald grandfather; his mother’s coldness (this gets close to psychobabble); and the general appeal of taking risks. ‘Like the member of a privileged aristocracy, of a libertine ...”

“... men and women as fleshed in clothes. ‘To be laid out upon a petticoat’ meant to have sex. When Queen Elizabeth imagined the ultimate destitution she said she might be cast out of her kingdom in her smock – she could imagine being deprived of everything, but not of her smock. Maria, in John Fletcher’s The Woman’s ...”

“... ever finding out what happened to Feathers as a child in Wales, handed over to a monstrous foster-mother, which is the teasing secret in Old Filth, only revealed at the very end. ‘There was some ghastly hang-up in his childhood. I don’t want to know about it. I guess half the men with his background are the same.’ And Filth seems fairly oblivious to the ...”

“... one in Frankfurt itself, others in London, Paris, Vienna and Naples. Heine spoke of the ‘mother of so many financial wizards, the family of moneylenders’, who ‘in spite of her sons’ world-famous reputations and wealth, does not want to leave her tiny family stronghold in the Judengasse’. The portrait has an air as much of the 16th century as ...”

“... throne, the Hanoverians sought to create a version of the much imitated garden at Versailles. Queen Caroline chose the Tudor demesne of Richmond to create a landscape garden: a cave with wax statues of Merlin and Elizabeth I suggested the culmination of Arthurian prophecy in the Hanoverian monarchy. Frederick ...”

“... Bloom. Its current iteration was as the ‘Green Vic’, an ethical version of the soap opera’s Queen Vic, where it was required to ‘employ people from disadvantaged backgrounds’. The food was vegan. ‘All over this area, wealthy corporations seek credentials by flirting with alternative value systems.’ A Bloomsday ...”

“... 1960s.’ Speaking as one who spent his National Service trying to kill Malayan challengers to the queen’s dominion, I would remind Patel how much violence and counter-violence was unleashed before those nationalisms achieved their ends: riots and strikes often put down by gunfire, guerrilla uprisings, the murder of white ...”

“... distinguished physicians and scientists of the 16th and 17th centuries – prominent among them Queen Elizabeth’s surgeon, John Banister, as well as Francis Bacon, Sir Kenelm Digby and Robert Boyle. Mummy continued to be dispensed well into the 18th century, when Robert James’s Pharmacopeia Universalis ...”

“... Mrs Barbauld was born Anna Letitia Aikin in 1743. She was educated at home, mostly by her mother and mostly in seclusion from the schoolboys her father taught. She learned Latin and some Greek despite her father’s reluctance to teach her, but never overcame an uneasiness about the unwomanly impropriety of erudition. The example of her father’s ...”

“... and secular and religious events of these years. Anne Boleyn is beheaded. Jane Seymour becomes queen, has a son, dies. Abbeys are dissolved. The Plantagenet Pole family conspires against the crown. The rebellion known as the Pilgrimage of Grace rises in the North, unhappy with reforms in the Church, and is put ...”

“... Of aristocratic descent on both sides of the family, he inherited the Court connections of his mother, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary. At the age of 12 he was a Page of Honour to George V and in the late 1940s Private Secretary to Princess Elizabeth. From Harrow, and Trinity ...”