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“... and his posting at the Court of the repulsive King Ferdinand of Naples and his clever, fecund Queen, Maria Carolina, placed him very much in the outer circle of British diplomacy. Emma was a blacksmith’s daughter who never lost her Lancashire accent. She went to London, as so many did, and saved herself from the ...”

“... or the 85th birthday of Vaughan Williams, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or the opening of Queen Elizabeth Hall, Day-Lewis obliged with an appropriate verse. These public poems are not very good: Day-Lewis was not by nature a rhetorician, and his public poetic voice was at best unconvincing, and at worst ...”

“... Carstairs, the subject of Kate Summerscale’s vastly entertaining new biography, The Queen of Whale Cay, would seem to fall into the latter category. In the Twenties, Carstairs (1900-93) was briefly yet wildly celebrated as the ‘fastest woman on water’ – Britain’s premier speedboat-racer, winner of the ...”

“... even had its lost princess when, in the next year, his sister Elizabeth, afterwards known as the Queen of Hearts, married Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, and disappeared into a long and fairly inglorious future. Both events linger on in the shadowy background to Shakespeare’s very late play The Two Noble Kinsmen. This ...”

“... de Valois as director of the Royal Ballet in 1963, saying that he felt ‘like James I succeeding Queen Elizabeth’. Despite the obsession with Fonteyn and Nureyev, he insisted that the company couldn’t be run ‘for the benefit of two people’, and created The Dream in 1964 for Antoinette Sibley and Anthony ...”

“... the economic life of Stratford’s florists, Shakespeare is nearly as important as St Valentine or Mother – which at the close of their ritual progress from the Birthplace on Henley Street to Holy Trinity Church by the river they will solemnly lay on Shakespeare’s grave, or at least will pass to a parish volunteer nearby, to be added to a pile which must ...”

“... the most famous and most notorious men and women of her day – from Lord Shaftesbury to Queen Caroline, and from Wellington to Fanny Kemble – but in describing them she excelled at the vivid vignette rather than the comprehensive landscape. She pins down Talleyrand at a Tuileries reception, ‘crawling past me ...”

“... she sees it) by reference to the psychodrama of his childhood. At 15, Thackeray’s mother, Anne Becher, fell in love with a handsome but penniless young soldier, Lieutenant Henry Carmichael-Smyth. Her family falsely told the infatuated girl that her lover was dead of a sudden fever. Anne was shipped out as sexual cargo to India, where she ...”

“... aspired to Gainsborough as a take on the aristocracy of London, c.1971, but owed more to Harpers & Queen. The fashion bubble of Sixties London was not quite the fourth dynasty or the historical watershed of the Crimean War. What was of interest at that time cannot be deduced from Ossie’s frocks any more than the Eighties ...”

“... to prosperity and prestige. It appears to have been the first of his plays to be acted before Queen Elizabeth, and it was later revived for James after Shakespeare’s company had been adopted as the King’s Men. It has usually been read as an ostentatiously effortless display of how a degree-less provincial could ...”

“... Blue Bird. The work starred Jane Fonda as Night, Ava Gardner as Luxury, and Elizabeth Taylor as Queen of Light and Maternal Love. You can see where the problems might arise, even if Maeterlinck was not a bit of a problem to start with. It was a Soviet-American coproduction, partly shot in what was then Leningrad, where ...”

“... fast that it was daily harder to measure the fall. Charles Windsor (future sovereign etc) and his mother were chiefly preoccupied with making life more tolerable for him by navigating Camilla Parker-Bowles back into public acceptability. Without offending the wish of two divorcees for a decent life together, one can surely point out that, set against the ...”

“... his daughter-in-law (their grandmother), and by their pompous circumstantial uncle. Their widowed mother, brave and tearful and intermittent, threatens the decorum of it all. Behind the contrasting frames of mind and styles of architecture, there loom the twined ancient families: the Tothills, who had been flamboyant and had even perhaps figured in the heated ...”

“... apologise, brag, defend, accuse, entertain, mislead, console etc). The selections include Queen Charlotte Sophia chastising her son William for being ‘a true trifling character’, emigrant Anne Francis on the ants and jackals greeting colonists in South Africa, Fanny Burney on her mastectomy, two reports of ...”

“... to a dysfunctional middle-class couple. Her emotionally absent father, a doctor, treated her mother like a fool. Her deeply conventional mother tried to co-opt her sympathy, while repeatedly criticising her looks (about which Renault would always be sensitive), complaining that she was insufficiently ladylike and ...”