“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and finally political history – as well as the longest entry in Britain’s Who’s Who. Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas, Prince of Battenberg, was born on 25 June 1900, the second son of Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Victoria. His father, grandson of the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt and son of Prince Alexander of Battenberg, had joined ...”

“... light, not least because of his failure to invite his brilliant Chief of Staff, Major-General Sir Francis de Guingand, to share the glory. There are fascinating glimpses of Monty’s spartan tactical headquarters and of his spirited young liaison officers, or ‘gallopers’, who drove through chaos and ruin to bring back intelligence for their early-to-bed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... us that for the original believers in the moral sense, both words would have been stressed. Francis Hutcheson supposed it the nature of the senses, when not warped by custom or tyranny, to grow increasingly complex and refine themselves towards an embrace of the beautiful and good. This would become the ground note of the Unitarian creed, the premise of ...”

“... Vanderborcht, John Vander-heydon, Adrian Van-Diest, Sir Anthony Vandyck, William Vander-velde, Francis Vanzoon, Herman Verelst and F. de Vorsterman, and with a little more diligence he could easily have doubled this collection of foreign Englishmen. Of the 106 painters accorded a biographical sketch by Buckeridge, 55 were immigrants or visitors to ...”

“... anti-semitism was part of the eugenic philosophy which the writer had picked up second-hand from Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, whose public lectures the Fabians were attending in the early 1900s and who, as Parrinder notes, ‘campaigned for eugenic legislation not unlike that in the Third Reich’. It is a crucial point in Parrinder’s line of argument ...”