“... dimensions to Balboa’s claim five years later. Being a Portuguese in the service of a Spanish king, Magellan had the meridian of hemispheres running through his soul: the Tordesillas line, which divided the world between Spain and Portugal in the West, would divide it again in the East. But Magellan’s idea of a South Sea, which he (probably) called the ...”

“... rather like the laws of physics. The mystery of the Universe’s origins is not so much how, pace King Lear, something could have come of nothing, since a random fluctuation in a quantum field might have popped an inflatable particle into fleeting existence, but rather where the quantum field itself might have come from. Or is to raise such a question merely ...”

“... perhaps of ten thousand knew what right any man had to command him, or what necessity there was of King or Commonwealth.’ By the beginning of the war, Hobbes had done the analysis he thought necessary: he had rejected what he called the ‘Aristotelity’ he was taught at Oxford, he had embraced something like the Euclidean method for the human sciences, he ...”

“... commentary on such sensational masterpieces as Cellini’s gold and enamel salt cellar made for Francis the First or his bronze Perseus with the decapitated Medusa (spurting stiff curls of blood) which has always stood in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence. His book is sumptuously produced and (for the most part) superbly illustrated. But the publishers have ...”

“... the Messianic countdown itself: the time of waiting for the end time, or for Apocalypse, ‘a king on a white horse, riding into Jerusalem wearing gold armour, perhaps with an army, too, with warriors who would seize power alongside him and bring about the final order of the world’. Unless ‘the coming Messiah is a suffering, aching Messiah, trodden ...”

“... were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life out of the story of this king.’ To the 17th-century republicans Edmund Ludlow and Algernon Sidney, Henry would be ‘that monster of mankind’, ‘one of the most violent princes we ever had’. To Bolingbroke in the 18th century, Henry’s would appear the most ‘severe’ of ...”

“... and a visual double meaning, where like objects are compared. In Winter, which is Arcimboldo’s King Lear, the decrepitude and decay we are seeing more of in the mirror on fine bright days is compared with the decrepitude and decay in a tree, another living body with a skin, and sinews, and growths, and sagging muscles. It is a most moving study of slow ...”

“... of the ecclesiastical courts. Since he urged that these courts be brought under the control of the King in Parliament, More had to tread warily. The great question of the English Reformation, the royal claim to be supreme head of the Church in England, was at issue. He knew what might be in store for him in this world, and he feared what might be his lot in ...”

“... 1957 exegesis of the monarch’s ‘two bodies’ and the political theology of the king’s person as an incarnation of the state. Recently, however, voices have been raised in dissent against the swollen ‘body’ industry, notably by Terry Eagleton, for whom the endless discussion of the body remains a tiresome and dubiously fruitful ...”

“... ever seen. I text my friends a picture of it, to give them an idea of the infant’s proportions. King Baby, I call him, and steal looks at him throughout the flight; reassured, protected, in the presence of a monument.At the airport, I text my Lady’s Companion, my friend Hope. ‘Were you joking when you invited me to come with you to Rome?’ she wrote to ...”

“... vulcanite mouthpieces frequently containing debris with a more or less bad odour.’ In June, Dr Francis Allan, a medical officer of the City of Westminster, reported the results of tests done on swabs taken from the mouthpieces of transmitters in public call boxes. One had attached to it a ‘mass of whitish-grey viscid substance’. The viscid substance ...”

“... a few miles south of the Scottish border, between Otter-burn and Falstone, as the elder son of Sir Francis Marbot Bt, the only Roman Catholic among the titled gentry of Northumberland. Andrew’s mother, Lady Catherine, born in 1781 in Dresden, was the daughter of Lord Claverton, who had retired to Redmond Manor (now the property of an Arab magnate), some ...”

“... to the Auld Alliance, Mary signed herself ‘Marie’ all her life. Had her first husband Francis II not died without producing an heir, ‘Scotland,’ Mackay concedes, ‘might have become a French appanage.’ Despite all this In My End Is My Beginning prefers to suggest that a misunderstood proto-liberalism was more responsible for the Queen’s ...”

“... another level of meaning, which is generally thought to have been added to the words in 1725, when Francis Hutcheson invented the phrase ‘greatest happiness for the greatest numbers’, later adapted by Bentham. The words, in Milton’s usage, have a general, public application which speaks for his unrelenting social activism. They are touched or toughened ...”