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“... 1634, after Charles I had granted a warrant to Sir Saunders Duncombe, a gentleman-pensioner of the King, giving him the sole right to build covered chairs and operate them for hire in London and Westminster for 14 years.’ Fifteen years later, it was in a sedan chair that the King was transported from the courtroom to the ...”

“... somewhat romantic view of Charles II’s many affairs of the heart and her warm sympathy for the King, it is a doubly apt admission. The book is much more, however, than an account written around the royal harem. It is a portrait drawn from the absorption of many sources. No biographer of the supposedly indolent yet Merry Monarch (rightly shown here to be ...”

“... the tradition of legal sanctuary clung on until James I finally ended it in 1623. A decade later, John Ford used sanctuary as a plot device in his play The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck (1634). Warbeck was a pretender who claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, one of the princes in the Tower murdered by Richard III. The new ...”

“... it may be in the interest of the most venerable institutions of the state that they should do so. King Henry V is all the better for having been Prince Hal, but no woman could propose to imitate the sun (or the moon?) and allow the base contagious clouds to smother up her virtue and beauty from the world in order that her charms should shine out all the more ...”

“... who describe 17th-century England as a country ridden with class hatred, but 1688 bore it out. John Miller’s Seeds of Liberty, although emphasising the dependence of the Revolution on its acceptance by a broad and well-informed political nation, concedes that the nobles led and the people followed. A hundred years later the principle of deference looked ...”

“... her lifetime and all but forgotten after her death in 1732. In this, the first full-length study, King has new archival research to draw on and is able to piece together some obscure periods of Barker’s life, especially her years of exile in France between 1689 and 1704. She can ‘reasonably surmise’ that her subject was at different times an anatomy ...”

“... the real-life Rochester, Alexander Larman provides a workmanlike account of an improvident life. John Wilmot was born in 1647 on All Fools’ Day. His father, one of Charles II’s most stalwart lieutenants, had fought for the king and fled the field with him after the royalist defeat at the battle of Worcester. The two ...”

“... as an idyllic apogee of national self-definition. By the time Shakespeare and his apprentice John Fletcher co-wrote All Is True (printed as Henry VIII) in 1613, wistfulness for the previous reign was already growing, despite what the playwrights and others may have recalled about Tudor rule: agricultural depression, enclosure, the plague, the poor law ...”

“... answer, but there is a case to be made the other way, as Hutton indicated in Witches, Druids and King Arthur (2003). The same could be said about King Arthur as about druids. On the one hand we have the ‘historical King Arthur’, about whom we know effectively nothing – not even ...”

“... many dreamed of a distant saviour. Christians across Europe believed in the existence of Prester John, a Christian ruler thought to be based in East Africa, or perhaps the Indian Ocean. They thought that if he could be reached and convinced to launch a military intervention, it might just turn the tide against Ottoman expansion. There were also rumours of a ...”

“... player of the year would be depressingly more expensive than the best novelist.) Only once, with John Berger in 1972, has a winner been graceless enough to allude publicly to the source of the prize-money in black men’s sweat. Booker judges change every year and the one stable element is Martyn Goff, the éminence grise of the panel which chooses the ...”

“... of Buckingham, set off for Madrid incognito. They wore false beards, and they called themselves John and Thomas Smith. Their mission was to win the hand of the sister of the king of Spain, the Infanta María. The courtly duo were not well suited to a life in mufti. The only coins they carried were of a suspiciously large ...”

“... posthumous miracles had begun to be attributed to him, and he was officially canonised by Pope John XXII in 1320. The story, in outline, runs thus. On the morning of (probably) 26 November 1290, Cragh and Trahaearn ap Hywel, a fellow rebel, were led out from their prison in the de Briouze castle of Swansea to the place of execution, on rising ground ...”

“... Modern academic historians​ want nothing to do with King Arthur. ‘There is no historical evidence about Arthur; we must reject him from our histories and, above all, from the titles of our books,’ David Dumville wrote in 1977; and he was backed up by, for instance, J.N.L. Myres in 1986: ‘No figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian’s time ...”

“... prototype. While modern French scholarship busies itself with probing the dreams of the poem’s king in order to uncover a ‘feudal libido’, can we recapture the dreams that troubled the original Charlemagne (a light sleeper, as it happens)? Already in the Early Medieval period people were in the business of making images for themselves and investing ...”