“... which in 1598 had given them a privileged, if permanently subordinate, place in the realm, but the king insisted that they remould their loyalty to renounce their faith. It was not surprising that their reactions to this pressure sometimes swayed. Josias de Robillard, the husband of Marie de la Rochefoucauld, wrote to his children in 1685 urging them to remain ...”

“... Randall Jarrell’s possible suicide, Bill’s own depression. And I talked to him about William James’s own breakdown and his resuscitation through faith. What in hell am I doing with all these theatre types? Alfred Kazin’s journals, 26 December 1986 Discount Kazin’s weary, load-bearing sigh in this characteristic entry from his journals, which ...”

“... In 1905 a British journalist called James Dodds Henry travelled to Baku, an enclave on the southern frontier of the Russian Empire that had recently become the centre of the world oil industry. ‘If oil is king, Baku is its throne,’ he wrote in Baku: An Eventful History. But the Russian industry was even then beginning a precipitous decline following a series of crippling strikes in the oilfields led by a young Joseph Stalin, and rebellion was spreading across the Caucasus ...”

“... absorbing. Hortense reports her sister Marie’s flirtation with the young (and as yet unmarried) King Louis and the way everyone teased her about it, but she’s more interested in recounting a practical joke played by their uncle, Cardinal Mazarin, on their youngest sister, Marie-Anne, who was then about six. (Marie-Anne was to marry Maurice-Godefroy de la ...”

“... being looted in Dartmouth. Promising Elizabeth £80,000 from the spoils (a ransom suitable for a king rather than a very lucky courtier) he shot off west. Over the next few years Ralegh was obliged to concentrate on West Country business, while he watched the Earl of Essex rise to royal favour. The two men had an uneasy truce, during which Ralegh sailed ...”

“... Alongside his preaching, the enterprising reverend ran a pulpwooding crew in which his nephew, James Hicks, was employed until he quit, nervous of his uncle’s increasingly sinister reputation. Quitting didn’t do him any good. In February 1976 Hicks, who was 22, was found dead in his Pontiac Firebird with some small cuts but – according to the autopsy ...”

“... tragedies like Hamlet: this of course gives the play its mysterious third line, ‘Long live the king!’ At the end of long phases of fascism in the modern world, we think of power as corrupting, even absolutely corrupting, but a very great work of creation, such as Creation itself, can be, as it is revealed by God to Job, sublime, mysterious and good. In ...”

“... forcible removal of a belt might imply, is unclear. But his companion on the mission, the Athenian king Theseus, certainly either rapes or elopes with Hippolyta’s sister, Antiope, and takes her back to Athens as his wife. (In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare, following a minor variant of the myth reported by Plutarch, calls her Hippolyta, not ...”

“... strip them of the sense that they, too, were hidalgos, with leaders who were more royal than any king or sultan; they were the nobility of Jerusalem ‘that is in Sepharad’, as the prophet Obadiah had said, and as Bishop Alonso de Cartagena reiterated; and their leaders were reputedly of the stock of King David. To ...”

“... of ourselves and, in the tradition of Shakespeare, blend the roles of girl and boy, man and woman, king and fool, queen and servant.’ One of the desperate acts of her youth involved stealing tools, first a spanner to fix her bike, then a hammer, and hiding them in her clothes so that she, like Falstaff, would have heft, sheer mass, more metal, and wouldn’t ...”

“... predecessors. Perhaps the main reasons lie in 20th-century history. The Victorian statue of King Alfred of Wessex which stands in the market square of his birth-place, Wantage, testifies to a pride in that great founding father which modern England no longer feels. We have shrunk, and Alfred has shrunk with us. Perhaps, too, the defeat of Nazism left ...”

“... Queen Elizabeth. The greater part of the book explores the plays about English history: the six King Henry plays and two King Richard plays, which relate the origins and course of the Wars of the Roses, and King John. But there are also extensive discussions of the contemporary ...”

“... will be no occasions of it. The first two occasions offered dismal precedents. Mary I’s consort, King Philip of Spain, was dangerously powerful in his own right, and only Mary’s barrenness saved England from becoming yet another component of the Habsburg Empire. Her half-sister, Elizabeth I, avoided the problem by avoiding matrimony altogether. Anne’s ...”

“... to outdo all autodidacts. His next, barely more palatable option was to join his elder brother James in his Boston printing works. Josiah had whipped Benjamin regularly, and now James beat him too, for smuggling saucy comment pieces into the New-England Courant under the alias of a worthy widow called Silence Dogood ...”

“... in a male, homosocial elite, owes much to the ethos and economy that grew up around the court of King James VI and I. By 1605-8, the likely date of Timon, the Scottish king had been on the English throne for several years, and a pattern had been established. He bought the loyalty of the nobility and the affection of ...”