“... year, having composed an ode celebrating the Jameson Raid and the well-known lines on the death of Edward VII. Along the electric wires the message came, He is no better, he is much the same. That at least is funny – indeed positively good in its way – and preferable to the era of Ghastly Good Taste in public verses that was to follow. Even Day-Lewis was ...”

“... valuable and what isn’t, the Council’s main concern is of course with cash. Out of office, Norman St John-Stevas would say that government provision for the arts was wholly inadequate: in office, he reduced that provision. Lord Gowrie, better attuned to his party’s mood, was so far from thinking the grant inadequate that he cut it again and ...”

“... In November, Norman Tebbit spoke to the Financial Times of a ‘long revolution’, lasting perhaps twenty years. Nevertheless, he said, ‘when you’ve run through health and education, and had another hard look at the structure of welfare benefits, then it’s difficult to see where the revolution could go on from there ...”

“... in the Conservative camp, on which all their three great warlords agreed – Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Lord Young – as did their retinues of ad-men and advisers, was to run a campaign fuelled by fear, a re-run of ‘Don’t let Labour ruin it.’ Fear was a tune which the Prime Minister had practised assiduously over the years: fear of ...”

“... Frank Sinatra raised money for the Reagans and acted as at least a confidante to the First Lady. Norman Podhoretz’s son-in-law Elliott Abrams, while working as Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State, dunned the Sultan of Brunei for a $10 million backhander to the Contras and then lost the money in a Swiss computer error. Ronald Reagan sent three envoys ...”

“... of hospitality in 1575. Among other remodellings, Leicester had enlarged the windows of the Norman keep the better to show off his substantial collections of maps and paintings (their glassless shapes in the remaining walls still look impressive, even from the bench), but, dissatisfied even with the enormous hall and galleries added by John of Gaunt in ...”

“... that he mustn’t mention ‘that woman’s name’. David, or the Duke of Windsor as the lapsed Edward VIII is now to be called, is a benumbed and bitchy mummy’s boy (played here by Alex Jennings, a seasoned royal impersonator), and he spends the entirety of The Crown’s first series bumbling about and giggling at farting pugs. Some people imagine that ...”

“... and writer for hire, composing saints’ lives for a number of monasteries in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest. He was commissioned to write the Life of Edith by Godgifu, the abbess of Wilton Abbey in Wiltshire. In his prologue, Goscelin explains that Godgifu and the other nuns told him about the events of Edith’s life, which were part of the ...”

“... gone in search of a ‘usable past’ in London or Stratford-upon-Avon. The interpreters then were Edward R. Murrow and a younger Alistair Cooke, who spoke urgently to a multinational audience for whom mutual understanding was a matter of survival, and the guidebooks to Anglo-American cultural differences were those now forgotten pamphlets issued to British ...”

“... man, retrieved his helmet safely from the shrubbery. For the Wodehouse archive he is assembling, Edward Cazalet, grandson of the 99-year-old widowed Lady Wodehouse, recently bought, for £175, a short ts. letter from Wodehouse to a Mr Slater, dated 2 July 1953. Mr Slater had asked Wodehouse where Market Blandings was, the station for the Castle, with Jno ...”

“... a male heir through six successive brides produced only one legitimate son, and when young King Edward died in his teens, it left Edward’s half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, to succeed to the crown. Both had survived various indecisive marriage negotiations proposed by their father, and once liberated from much male ...”

“... 1932, but this lighter version had meanwhile surfaced in English disguise, because the publisher Edward Arnold had read and liked the French typescript and commissioned a Leyden Anglicist, Fritz Hopman, to go back to the Dutch original and translate it into English à la Champion. Hopman got Huizinga’s approval for this and the result was The Waning of the ...”

“... and honourable English descent’, according to Hardiman’s History of Galway: a family of Norman-Welsh origin who had come to Connaught in the 1200s, intermarried with the O’Flahertys, and become, in the words of Jackson and Costello, ‘as the saying was, more Irish than the Irish themselves’. The first-known of the name was Thomas Joyce, one of ...”

“... with the trade union movement, with ethnic consciousness, and with the founding by his father Norman Manley of the People’s National Party, of which the author is now the leader. (If Edward Seaga is interested in Jamaica’s cricket fortunes, the matter is not mentioned here.) It is easy to see that the question of ...”

“... The Horners of Mells commissioned from Munnings and Lutyens a large equestrian statue of their son Edward, but the villagers did not favour the idea of a young horseman riding up the aisle of the church and, finally, the statue was squeezed into the family’s private chapel. It is a pity, perhaps, that so much attention is given to the already over-exposed ...”