“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from the period. When Harington’s lesser efforts are also taken into account – a supplement to Francis Godwin’s Catalogue of Bishops, the short relation of his time in Ireland (which he wrote as part of an audacious but failed attempt to be made Chancellor of Ireland and Archbishop of Dublin in 1605), his translation of the School of Salerne (a popular ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Atlantic than any other organisation. It was an embarrassing but hardly revelatory find: the king was the company’s titular governor and historians have long known of his shareholding. But it vividly illustrates the fact that the elite had a stake in the seamiest forms of overseas expansion.Because companies landed in unmapped and poorly understood ...”

“... the early modern sense of receipts, or texts received: ‘Fine Sauce for a roasted Rabbet: used to king Henry the eight’; ‘To comfort the heart, and take away Melancholy’; ‘To make red sealing Waxe’; ‘Marmalad of Quinces’; ‘To make Oile of Earth wormes … good for the sinews that are cold’; ‘To bake a Capon with yolks of Eggs’; ‘To ...”

“... end of the year, Becket had fled England in disguise and sought asylum in the lands of the French king, Louis VII. Detail from a 13th-century Miracle window at Canterbury Cathedral depicting the castration of the peasant Eilward. Both Becket and Henry tried to enlist papal support, but Alexander III, mired in his own difficulties and also in exile in ...”

“... about to land in Sussex or Cumbria, or invade through Wales, with assistance from the pope or the king of France, or sometimes the dukes of Guise and Parma. Her advisers warned her that English Catholics had never stopped plotting to put another queen in her place.On Mary’s side – the show delivers on its promise of ‘equal billing’ – there’s a ...”

“... apparently, are the truncated versions – Grove Street in Oxford, Grape Lane in York. Naturally, Francis Grose’s entry in his Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue gets furious disapproval: ‘The second edition (1788), incredibly and offensively, defined cunt, or c**t, as “a nasty name for a nasty thing”.’ Decent writing, of course, is every bit as ...”

“... Brancusi didactically entitled Adam and Eve, Socrates, Little French Girl and – shown below – King of Kings (Spirit of Buddha) together define the breadth of the perceived cultural malaise and the role of self-conscious primitivism as plasma: ‘self-conscious’ because it was the product of educated, independent, ego-driven artistic choice rather than a ...”

“... was stage-managed by Scott) – opposite the playbill for a production in 1823 of Shakespeare’s King John at the Theatre Royal, which boasted an ‘Attention to Costume never before equalled on the English Stage’. A playbill for a production of Shakespeare’s ‘King John’ in 1823. The century before Scott’s ...”

“... of espionage, where every straight action is mirrored by treachery, where the agent provocateur is king. Charles Nicholl has previously written on alchemy in the Elizabethan age. ‘As above, so below’: this was the maxim of alchemists. It works in the real world too. The factious giants of Elizabeth’s court are supported by a vast root-system of ...”

“... Marco Polo, for whom all commodities were licit objects of exchange, William as a disciple of St Francis had taken a vow of poverty. At the Great Khan’s reception, he met some envoys from India who presented the ruler with eight leopards and ten greyhounds trained to ride horseback. William’s humble gifts of fruit and wine could scarcely compete. The ...”