“... 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 ...”

“... the obligation of men to perform their political covenants. And it was there that the Levellers John Wildman and Maximilian Petty mounted the fundamental challenge to the constitution that would be rewarded by the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords two years later. Even the sophisticated qualifications of modern scholarship, which have dwelled on ...”

“... of a Nice American Kid. (He still speaks of latterday players as ‘kids’, a term that sits on John Newcombe and Stan Smith as askew as on a lord mayor.) He was tall and, if not quite clean-cut, skinny. He looked as if he would converse by shuffling his large feet and muttering ‘Aw, shucks’. (Thus kids muttered in novels of the period. What they said ...”

“... In March​ 1968, only a few days before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr visited Long Beach, a suburb of New York City, at the invitation of a local NAACP leader. Like many suburbs at that time, Long Beach was effectively a segregated community, with an African American population living in a tiny ghetto and working in the homes of local white families ...”

“... Fifty years, almost to the month, before the publication of John Adamson’s book, Hugh Trevor-Roper stated his intention to write what he knew would be ‘a very long book’, the most ambitious of his career, on the Puritan revolution of 17th-century England. The project went through many mutations over the next four years, but by 1961 it was virtually complete ...”

“... monarch, out of the rough and ready business of governing its Indian possessions. To introduce the king or queen risked elevating the Indian rajas to an inconvenient status, licensing them to consider themselves as lieges or allies of the crown, with the right to approach the monarch directly on all sorts of embarrassing questions. The rapacious Wellesley and ...”

“... paperbacks – and to Newbolt’s great delight Mary Coleridge did almost equally well with The King with Two Faces, a novel based on the murder of the Swedish king, in which the author identified herself closely and obviously with the aristocratic young hero. Newbolt was soon enveloped and adored by these dashing and ...”

“... Spycatcher fame, a former MI5 officer whose evidence has to be treated cautiously, says that Cecil King, the Daily Mirror boss, ‘was a long-time agent of ours’. Perhaps. Or did Mr King, like other Fleet Street executives, simply exchange information over a long lunch or a clubland dinner? While the secret state was ...”

“... at the age of 24. Except for a short interval of three years from 1801 to 1804 he remained the King’s first minister for the rest of his life. So Pitt moved, imperceptibly ... down’ not in the offices he held, only in his achievements in the highest office and in health. As minister he was best in the 1780s, when he presided over Britain’s recovery ...”

“... on to Malta and then to England, where she arrived in June 1827 and was taken to Windsor. The king had her fed on a supposedly nourishing diet of milk, ordered a warm and commodious stable to be constructed for her comfort, and commissioned portraits of her from three painters. But she didn’t thrive. Her head began to droop and physicians were ...”

“... Twenty-one years ago, in The Characters of Love, John Bayley suggested that ‘there is a sense in which the highest compliment we can pay to Shakespeare is to discuss his great plays as if they were also great novels.’ At that time, Othello seemed to him particularly (indeed uniquely) responsive to such treatment ...”

“... to cause trouble in the school of Laon, Abelard comes back to Paris, perhaps under the auspices of King Louis’s chancellor Stephen de Garlande, to set up his own school in the cloister of Notre Dame. He becomes famous as the wizard of logic, launches the logical rage that was to govern or misgovern the next four centuries of the intellectual history of the ...”