“... and pop-eyed, Saying the gains the SDP has made All clearly point to a retreating tide. Thus King Canute spake as his feet got wetter, But further up the beach his court knew better. But now a comic opera interlude Wins our attention from domestic cares. The generals in the Argentine, though rude And cruel and prone to giving themselves airs, Have in ...”

“... reason, too-that they feared for their own privilege. At High Table they sang ‘God Save the King’, and drank the King’s health: the first of these gestures was called off in 1939, the second in 1945. I sometimes wonder: what would have happened in Easter Week 1916, if the rebels had seized not the General Post ...”

“... as ‘the representative of the goddess of health in the more or less indecent exhibition of John Graham ... a quack-doctor’, but Ms Fraser dismisses this association with a Georgian peep-show on chronological grounds, and plausibly suggests that the legend was derived retrospectively from a Rowlandson cartoon that belongs to the years of her ...”

“... dissimilar to the Land of Oz). One evening in Westwood Village, after seeing Scorsese’s film The King of Comedy, I noticed Steven Spielberg coralled by rain in the cinema foyer, preferring multiple recognition to getting wet on his way to the parking lot. Sunday jogging between the smoggy carriage-ways of San Vicente came to a halt, which must have been a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... lodges, and in the course of the century the rituals took permanent shape around the legend of King Solomon’s Temple, while the Masonic message crossed the Channel to France, probably borne there by Jacobite exiles. In Britain the middle and professional classes have provided the society’s main support ever since the period of consolidation. Stephen ...”

“... version, but he would have known the mythic one quite well: for in the story of Perseus, the king and his court, who had sent the hero for the head of Gorgon Medusa, had to look when he took the disfigured thing from his bag, and were turned into stone. What goes for seeing also goes for imagining we are seeing. We do a lot of such imagining, and many of ...”

“... Office as a cipher clerk. In due course she was sent to Egypt, where she had an affair with big King Farouk (‘I was never bored’), then on to Italy and Greece. Her tour of duty cut short by the Greek Civil War, she came back to London and more of the same, except that now rich John Sutro was her principal beau, with ...”

“... its mass media, sometimes at the expense of its idea of nationality. On the eve of World War Two, John Reith believed passionately in radio broadcasting as an extension of national culture, but was outmanoeuvred by the audience’s delight in ‘knob-twiddling’. By 1935, there were 7.4 million radio licences in the United Kingdom, but not all radios were ...”

“... and concludes nervously: ‘that man inspires by fear.’ Chapter 7, ‘At the Court of the Sun King’, spells it out. The generous, inspiring proprietor who so charmingly persuaded those journalists not to turn against their editor, is transformed by his protégé into Rupert Fear. He is, to start with, ‘much more right-wing than is generally ...”

“... for fresh marches of conquest. The ensuing adventures were narrated with devastating flatness by John Hemming in The Search for El Dorado. The gold-hunters got lost, ate grubs, grass and one another, were plagued by bugs and vampires, swelled or shrivelled or turned orange, devoured sweaty saddles in fits of salt-thirst, perished of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”