“... Lords. His speech was a passionate defence of the Nottingham weavers – followers of the mythical King Ludd – who had been smashing the new mechanical stocking-frames; and for the rest of his life Byron went on arguing that ‘we must not allow mankind to be sacrificed to improvements in mechanism.’ But what might have happened if the enemies of mechanism ...”

“... he smashed up a priceless sundial in the Whitehall Privy Gardens bearing glass portraits of the king and the royal family.) Aggravated disturbances, big and small, give his poetry its character. The opening lines of ‘Tunbridge Wells’, a satire on the ‘fooles’ who flock to the spa town, are casually respectable but unmistakably dirty: ‘Att five ...”

“... be done by the rule of government.’ It took the rest of the 17th century – a civil war, the king’s execution, the implosion of the republic, the restoration of the monarchy and the coup d’état we know as the Glorious Revolution – to establish that government enjoyed no such extra-legal power.In 1685 the Duke of York, who had been brought up in ...”

“... it by providing detailed evidence to the contrary. A year or so before he died, according to Charles Greville, George IV slept badly and used to ring his bell ‘forty times in the night’. He had a watch close by him, but he sent for his valet de chambre rather than look at it. ‘The same thing if he wants a glass of water; he won’t stretch out his ...”

“... school up the road – ever saw, and I appreciated it. Round a corner or two in Petty Cury was King Street, where there stood a rank of pubs. A rite of passage in those days was to inhale a pint of suds in each within the space of an hour – the ‘King Street run’ – without puking, or without puking until the ...”

“... there is Laudianism, the new-fangled High Churchmanship which was awarded political ascendancy by Charles I. Then, opposed to it, there is the old-fashioned Calvinism of that doyen of Puritan scholars, the Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher. Although the first system was less dogmatic than the second, both of them closed their adherents’ minds. Between them ...”

“... featured in our histories. As Clarendon, the first and greatest historian of the time, wrote of Charles’s relations with London: ‘the city was looked upon by the crown as a “common stock” not easily to be exhausted and as a body not to be grieved by ordinary acts of injustice.’ The city’s later Royalism, Ashton tells us, should be attributed to ...”

“... her definite superior in intelligence: the only one of Henry’s six wives whose marriage to the king was regularly called her ‘reign’ by contemporaries. That she had a mind of her own and was not afraid to use it is the most plausible explanation of her eventual downfall in 1536. Eric Ives’s biography of Anne, published in 2004, revealed her as a ...”

“... until her death in 1861. Late in life, she charged more for one of her ‘lectures’ than Charles Dickens could command for his readings, and her doings would be reported in the same paragraph as news of Queen Victoria. Her fame was huge and preposterous. In an age before the moving image, she turned herself into a cartoonish celebrity: a woman acting ...”

“... with the best claim to embody the ‘Stuart’ qualities, for better or for worse, has to be King James VI and I. This is because he enjoyed a double dose of Stuart blood due to his mother’s marrying her step-first cousin, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley: thus, incidentally, introducing the Anglo-French spelling of the name to the Royal house (although Mary ...”

“... who survived the Flood by riding astride the Ark, is derived from a rabbinical story of Og, King of Bashan. He also suggests that Rabelais was sympathetic to the ‘Ancient Theology’, the idea of a special revelation to non-Christian sages like Orpheus, Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus. The medical and legal allusions are in even greater need of ...”

“... reversal in the fortunes of his species that he seems to overturn. For it was the wealth of Charles Howard, Seabiscuit’s owner, amassed by selling Buicks, that made possible his love affair with racing, and his particular and passionate love affair with the bandy-legged colt who became a national hero. ‘The day of the horse is past, and the people ...”

“... was a popular conceit in the 1640s. For royalists like Reresby, those who took up arms against the king were taking on God. Ann Fanshawe, the daughter of a royalist MP, who was 17 when she fled to Charles I’s wartime headquarters in Oxford, likened herself to a fish out of water. The conflict between ...”

“... The Protectorate was over, the Commonwealth had failed. Charles II entered London on 29 May 1660, his birthday, and began hanging judges and reopening theatres. Tongue firmly in cheek, a royal patent lamented that ‘many plays formerly acted do contain several profane, obscene and scurrilous passages’: the solution was to have women’s parts henceforth played by women, as ‘useful and instructive representations of human life ...”

“... and wash their hair in white spirit. The Duchess was keen for one of them to marry the Archduke Charles. Zita was ‘all the more attractive for just missing classical beauty’ – a description that might have come from Cecil Beaton’s transvestite spoof autobiography My Royal Past. ‘It would be idle to pretend that the young man’s position played no ...”