“... King remained loyal to him. On the eve of his death in 1625, James recommended Huntly to his son Charles as ‘the most faithful servant that ever served a prince’. The summer of 1587 also saw the visit to Scotland of Guillaume de Salluste, seigneur du Bartas, courtier of Henry, King of Navarre, and the leading exponent of Calvinist poetics. James had ...”

“... to use the attacks as an excuse to tighten even further its rules on immigration and asylum. Some hope is all I can say. Given how hard people have had to work to stop Charles Clarke’s Home Office sending asylum seekers they claim aren’t genuine back to Zimbabwe, of all places, that Blunkettised arm of government may ...”

“... are other contenders for the title, including Henry VIII, Good Queen Bess (the pirates’ patron), Charles I and, not least, Oliver Cromwell. The war in question is known to us as the War of Jenkins’s Ear, thus dubbed by Thomas Carlyle a century later. The extraordinary thing is that it was more than eight years since Captain Robert Jenkins of the brig ...”

“... stand. Their nation, of whose actuality they seem to possess only the frailest knowledge: Prince Charles, already well into middle age, was surprised to learn from a bibliomane that Charing Cross Road had once been the centre of the London book trade. He is constantly bemused by farmers using pesticides.What they do feel they know is that their subjects ...”

“... and it’s good enough for you.’ But with the research organised by such bodies as the Institut Charles-de-Gaulle and the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent bringing together those who knew and who worked with the General and historians with an interest in establishing their own analyses and narratives, we are able to proceed to new assessments both of ...”

“... the next one after that. And if the present queen had decided to call it a day at 70, then King Charles III and his mistress would by now already be installed in Buckingham Palace. It is impossible to know whether the British monarchy would have survived developments such as these. But it probably would have done: few sovereigns in modern history have lost ...”

“... 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 king and Parliament was supposed to end with one big battle at Edgehill on 23 October 1642. But it lasted four years. And even after ...”

“... and blamed their failures on the dead weight of resistance at all levels of society. John Cook, Charles I’s prosecutor, said that ‘we would have enfranchised the people, if the nation had not more delighted in servitude than in freedom.’ William Sedgwick told the generals that ‘not one of a hundred will own what you set down as the public interest ...”

“... that all men might see that she was with child’. What was it these men saw? It was reported to Charles V that his daughter-in-law was exhibiting the ‘customary symptoms’ of pregnancy: her colouring, ‘the state of her breasts’, the fact that her dresses no longer did up. She was expected to give birth in May 1555; a nursery was prepared and a cradle ...”

“... narrators ‘have a DISSECTIVE property in common, which is essentially not theirs but yours’. Charles Lever’s A Day’s Ride, on the other hand, was a disaster, and Dickens had to move in smartly with Great Expectations. His sensitive negotiations with Lever and with other novelists such as Charles Reade and Bulwer ...”

“... a law to make contraceptives available for the first time in Ireland, the then minister for health Charles Haughey described it as ‘an Irish solution to an Irish problem’. Permitting women to travel abroad for abortion is another such solution: keep the issue out of sight and out of mind. The abortion rate in Ireland will not fall if the referendum ...”

“... nun.’ Later on, her two mentors were the ponderous and pedantic philosopher Herbert Spencer and Charles Booth the social investigator and a live wire who introduced her to the world of politics and philanthropy. But to neither could she give her heart. ‘I must pour my poor crooked thoughts into somebody’s heart,’ she wrote, aged 15, at the beginning ...”

“... at length about his architectural hero, Albert Speer, whom he continues to see as the last great hope of classical urbanism. Speer, in Krier’s eyes, was the tragic victim of Nuremberg, incarcerated in Spandau because he was guilty of a passion for Doric columns, while the far more destructive Wernher von Braun was judged useful enough to be whisked to ...”

“... If Bill Rodgers, a privy councillor for thirty years, didn’t have the answers, what hope is there for the rest of us? What is this council, who are its members and what on earth does it do? The members include all present and past members of the cabinet, most living speakers and chief whips of parliament, a few members of the royal family, some ...”

“... full French control over the colony. The French forces, commanded by Napoleon’s brother-in-law Charles Leclerc, had some initial success. They captured Louverture, and shipped him back to France, where he died in captivity in 1803. But an epidemic of yellow fever killed many of the Europeans (Leclerc died of it) and opened the way to a black victory. On 1 ...”