“... after Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was exiled to Rangoon after the Great Rebellion could there be said to be a vacancy on the imperial throne. Taylor records the occasional efforts of Indian potentates to appeal directly to the British sovereign. He mentions, for instance, the gifts sent to William IV and Queen Adelaide by the new king of Oudh in 1834. But he ...”

“... rage at the mistake was a motivating factor in his alleged offence. Three police officers were said to have received minor injuries; presumably he hadn’t stopped to ask them for directions. Greg Milner includes a few stories about satnav fails in Pinpoint, his lively history of satellite navigation technology – his central chapter is called ‘Death by ...”

“... Brideshead Revisited. It watches him struggle with madness and depression and boredom. He could be said to have died of boredom, but, like the woman in Belloc’s poem, ‘not before/Becoming an appalling bore’ himself. His war had begun, like Guy Crouchback’s in the ‘Sword of Honour’ trilogy, as a crusade against the forces of atheism and ...”

“... correspondence with Queen Victoria alleged by Lord Esher in 1905 to have been destroyed by King Edward VII. Perhaps some of it was, but evidently much remains. I expressed the hope in the preface to my own book that one day ‘some wealthy foundation will finance a complete edition of the correspondence of the best letter-writer among all English ...”

“... moral certitude but his ‘poised ambiguities’. In the new edition, The Devil Is an Ass is said to be marked by ‘moral ambiguity’, while the editor of Bartholomew Fair identifies ‘indeterminable ambivalences’ in a play which ‘encourages openness to uncertainty and multiple possibilities’. Those cases are powerfully and sympathetically ...”

“... if he would throw Letterman out of the bar on the show. ‘No, I’m sorry, thank you,’ Bruno said over the phone. ‘Who’s David Letterman?’ he asked us. ‘I don’t know this person. Why do these people bother me? He must be some New York person.’ A New York person was not a good thing to be. Bruno found they tended to be noisy and ...”

“... loved to be photographed, he was not in the least concerned with his own image. Françoise Gilot said she couldn’t go on living with a monument, but that may have been sour grapes. No doubt he was passionately concerned with himself, but he was even more concerned with the things he made. And not with those he had made, but with whatever he happened to be ...”

“... to insist that those whom he criticises never held the views he imputes to them, and so never said what he denies. His use of ideal types makes it particularly easy to do the latter: he himself recognises that he has imposed a model on writers whose talk of peasants is rather looser than it becomes after his tidying-up. His critics have responded in both ...”

“... it can best be detected so.’ Seventy-four at the time, and three years from death, he probably said it to annoy the serious young dons in the serious new English departments, and he certainly succeeded. It pleased him not only to be a voice from the past, but a voice of almost youthful irresponsibility, dissent, blasphemy, iconoclasm. And it pleased him no ...”

“... Ekofisk area. In 1966 the Burmah Oil vessel, Ocean Prince, found oil off Cromer but nothing was said about this (the find was anyway too small to exploit): the companies played down their activity and tried to suggest that they were doing the Government a favour by prospecting at all in such inclement waters, while the Government seems to have been naive ...”

“... Australia) to the eastern Pacific, and perhaps beyond. In 1588 Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado sailed, or said he had sailed, from Davis Strait, north of Hudson Bay, into the fabled Strait of Anian that opened into the Pacific Ocean. These reports were later supported by Willem Schouten and Abel Tasman in the South Seas, and Juan de Fuca and Bartolomeo de Fonte in ...”

“... to dinner at Sandringham, where he joined the Queen Mother in a rousing chorus of ‘My old man said follow the van’. By then Coward had developed into the figure known to his staff – at his insistence – as the Master. Interviewing him for the Sunday Times in 1969, Hunter Davies wondered if he had really met Coward or just a facsimile. ‘Is there ...”

“... had succeeded in making her look again at Corbyn: ‘If this is happening 500,000 times,’ she said, spreading her hands to indicate the ramifications. None of them went so far as to say that Corbyn could win the election, but they thought it possible that Labour could emerge as the largest party in Parliament, which would require the Tories to suffer a ...”

“... cut in, the dwawl part amused, part irritated. ‘You do live in a wonderful fantasy world,’ he said. For many, most of all for many in Benn’s own Party, that is seen to be the truth of it. The caricature has shifted in the past few years: he is no longer seen as mad and dangerous, just as mad. Soon, he will have to fight hard against being ...”

“... us, and Scott explains them very well indeed, makes them very moving. In fact, it could almost be said that his characters are all the more convincing because we don’t know them: a paradox that carries its own penalties and rewards.Scott was probably quite unconscious of the fact that he had developed a technique of novel-writing which could only realise ...”