“... When​ Charlemagne, king of the Franks, planned the division of his empire between his sons in 806, he allotted Aquitaine, Gascony, Provence and half of Burgundy to one son; Lombardy, Bavaria and southern Swabia to another; to the eldest, northern France, the other half of Burgundy, northern Swabia, Thuringia, Saxony and Frisia ...”

“... is this ensemble, stretching across a millennium and round thousands of miles of coastline, that Richard Fletcher has taken as his subject in The Conversion of Europe. What concerns him is not the conversion of this or that people but all medieval conversions (including conversions between Christianity and its two rival monotheisms, Judaism and Islam, which ...”

“... flagrant contravention of the Second Commandment. But it’s much less obvious why Dr Faustus or King Lear, As You Like It or Volpone, should come under the same ban. O’Connell never does come up with a final answer; but his quest constitutes one of the most interesting explorations yet made, not just of the theology of the theatre, but of the connections ...”

“... had been the Duke of Windsor’s mistress before marriage and that England’s recently abdicated king sometimes drank too much. A writ was served and the action heard before the Lord Chief Justice, who declared in court that ‘these particular libels, a jury might think, appear almost to invite a thoroughly efficient horse-whipping.’ Author and publisher ...”

“... around in a very characteristic way, and blurted out his answer in a fast, high-pitched voice. ‘Richard,’ he said, ‘I think I see exactly what you mean, and it’s fascinating, but really I don’t see why "suburban". Aren’t you trying to be too – specific? I don’t see why suburban has anything to do with it. I really don’t think it has.’ At ...”

“... men. One of them, Prince Poniatowski, an acquaintance of her father and brother of the king of Poland, began a sexual relationship with her when she was only 13. By the time she was 15, they had a daughter, who accompanied her to Hamburg. Poniatowski lost interest, and departed the scene. By this time, Romellini had already begun an affair with ...”

“... II, the royal favourite Gaveston plans delicious entertainments which ‘may draw the pliant king which way I please’. He will introduce musicians to the court, ‘wanton poets’, Italian masques by night, and ‘pleasing shows’. Edward, walking abroad, is to encounter pages dressed as ‘sylvan nymphs’, and Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s ...”

“... It were a delicate stratagem,’ muses King Lear at one point during his great mad scene:                             to shoe A troop of horse with felt: I’ll put’t in proof; And when I have stol’n upon these sons-in-law. Then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill! R.A. Foakes and Brian Vickers, both approaching retirement after reigning for nearly thirty years in the upper reaches of Shakespeare studies, aren’t feeling entirely charitable towards their heirs either, although on the evidence of their new reflections on the state of that divided kingdom, Foakes is rather less malicious than his Shakespearean avatar, and Vickers rather less stealthy ...”

“... see grants of liberties as an expression of royal weakness. The outpouring of royal charters under Richard I and John has traditionally been regarded as the equivalent of selling the ancestral silver for petty cash. Paradoxically, this reading derives from another aspect of belief in the feudal system. If a ruler’s power consists of rights deriving from the ...”

“... as the royal motto still declares. But it was the son of Philip’s brother Charles who became king of France, reigning as Philip VI. Who had the better claim? If you accepted the notion of primogeniture, then Edward did, but if you believed that claims couldn’t descend through the maternal line, then the rightful ...”

“... is holding a copy of that morning’s Los Angeles Times, which reports details of the Rodney King trial. Now for all I know, George is so devoted to South Central LA that he holds a weekly acting workshop in Lynwood, but if he’s anything like most of the Anglos in Los Angeles, he is happier contemplating the minutiae of its native movie business than ...”

“... a phrase, a little high culture, but it has eerie undertones if you think about it. The soon-to-be Richard III had a very particular discontent in mind, and he had extreme solutions for it. Right at the end of the movie, a group of children in a classroom rise in turn, each saying, ‘I am Malcolm X,’ and of course this is attractive in terms of the fairy ...”

“... progress of the Vikings from raiders to settlers to would-be conquerors: an attempted invasion by King Sweyn of Denmark three years later was abortive, and though Norwegians continued for many years to control the Scottish islands in the far North, their effect on the British mainland was negligible.But if you take a more romantic view, the First Viking Age ...”

“... hates them all and is anguished with boredom. Then he comes across a reproduction of a portrait of Richard III and likes what he sees. ‘Someone too conscientious. A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist … He had that incommunicable, that indescribable look that childhood suffering leaves behind it.’ It’s a lot of romance to read into a medieval ...”

“... Mars shall on his altar sit/Up to the ears in blood. I am on fire.’ And Harriet Walter’s king – legs splayed as if on a bar stool rather than a throne – conveyed an authority which the whole world knows is fraudulent because it was founded on a crime (he deposed, imprisoned and some would say caused the death of his cousin ...”