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“... more than his father’s because of its connections with royalty (she was remotely descended from King James I of Scotland); at school, he boasted so much about the (alleged) venerability of his title that he was facetiously nicknamed ‘the Old English Baron’. Occasionally the pretension turned more prickly: invited to join a formal procession, he sulked ...”

“... the Protestant Irish, landowners, protectionists, the City, much of the Church of England and King George V. No Labour Government, not even Attlee’s, faced such a coalition. There was, of course, an unintended element to this; but it was the inevitable outcome of a strategy which originated with Gladstone and was continued by his successors: that you ...”

“... the prevailing condition of interdependence across the modern world. Neil MacCormick’s father, John, was the principal begetter of the SNP, from which he became estranged during the Second World War. At the queen’s accession MacCormick senior, still a leading nationalist but operating outside the ranks of the SNP, instigated the legal proceedings ...”

“... spring of 1953, during the first ever visit by an American secretary of state to the Middle East, John Foster Dulles made a point of including Cairo on his itinerary. Eisenhower and Dulles wanted Egypt to meet the Europeans halfway, i.e. to settle for something less than full sovereignty; to give Russia the cold shoulder, i.e. to side with the West in the ...”

“... and Christina Onassis, have been huge popular hits. There are wealthy hapless males, too – John Paul Getty III, for example, or Hans Rausing – who never find contentment. And Hamlet can stand for all the privileged sons born into misery at the centre of intrigues of familiar wealth and power. There is a double edge to our attention to the unhappy ...”

“... torments and frightful beasts painted like jewels. More recently, the awakened creature in John Carpenter’s The Thing, and H.R. Giger’s alien in the films of the same name are offered only in brief glimpses, to tease the audience, which wants to look long and hard on their strange and extraordinary beauty. Aesthetically as well as practically, it ...”

“... wan, sometimes wanton, according to the interplay between Humbert’s sentimentality and desire. John le Carré’s Perfect Spy, Magnus Pym, owes his training to a con man father. The only way for the child to know what is going on (Ricky Pym’s words and actions don’t tell him – on the contrary, they are monstrous mystifications) is to keep watch, to ...”

“... I called, ‘couple with me, as thou didst with Cadmus, Rhoecus, Tithonus, Endymion, and that king Numa Pompilius to whom thou didst give secrets. As Lilith comes without a sign, so come thou. As the sons of God come to copulate with women, so now let a daughter of Shekhina the Emanation reveal herself to me. Nymph, come now, come now.’ Like a lot of ...”

“... fought for something. Indian soldiers, as their letters reveal, for honour, the British for king and country. As one French soldier said simply, ‘I do not want to become a Boche.’ His fellow soldiers who mutinied in 1917 did so more because they did not want to die in futile attacks than to stop the war itself. For Germans, the war was about saving ...”

“... August 1517. There the ageing maestro showed them three paintings: two of these, the enigmatic St John the Baptist and The Virgin and Child with St Anne, are now in the Louvre; the third, which is almost certainly the Mona Lisa, was described by de Beatis (and, it is implied, by Leonardo himself) as the portrait of ‘a certain Florentine lady, done from life ...”

“... cigarettes promoted effeminacy in boys and mannishness in girls; James Harvey Kellogg, the cereal king, worried that male smokers risked ‘premature degeneration of the sex glands’. Businessmen and economists opposed smoking at work as a threat to productivity.The war transformed cigarettes from symbols of foreignness to emblems of patriotism. Duke and ...”

“... Back-Bone of an Eel’. And then the rabbits began to appear.A local apothecary and obstetrician, John Howard, was the first person outside her immediate circle to examine Toft. He said he felt something ‘leaping’ in her womb. Under his supervision in Guildford, she went on to deliver a large number of dead rabbits, nine in a single day. Howard wrote ...”

“... in his hospital bed becomes obsessed with rehabilitating the tarnished reputation of the dead king – sending his pet researcher off to the British Museum, calling for history books (they infuriate him; he prefers the account in historical novels) and eventually satisfying himself that Richard was not only innocent of murdering his nephews but ‘a man ...”

“... is in the process of being transcribed and digitised by a team of scholars from Dartmouth and King’s College London). Carolyn Dever’s Chains of Love and Beauty, the work of two decades, is the first critical book to focus on this enormous manuscript – which she admits is ‘by turns thrilling, boring and impossible; indeed, sometimes all three at ...”

“... It’s also haunted by other works, including Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, John Cheever’s Bullet Park and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road as well as novels by Generation X authors: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm. But the closest point of comparison is the film American Beauty. Both portray a ...”