“... had actually been started by the Scots and had been finally resolved, years later, in Ireland when James II, the last Stuart king, was defeated at the Battle of the Boyne in 1689, it was downright alarming to go home and see TV footage of riots at Orange parades that showed this supposedly definitive and long-past battle was ...”

“... So we have to ask why the Bishops’ Wars broke out in 1639; why the Scots won them; why the King and his English critics failed to reach a pre-war settlement; why the King failed to dissolve or prorogue the Long Parliament; why Englishmen took sides in 1642; why negotiation failed in the same year; why the majesty of ...”

“... in 2004 in Bulgaria, metres away from a royal tomb, it is a portrait head probably of Seuthes III, king of Thrace, commissioned from an Athenian artist around 300 BCE. It is extremely particular, neither standardised nor idealised, a small expanse of smooth face, a hooked nose, surrounded by separately created locks of hair and ungroomed beard, and centred on ...”

“... point in 17th-century England than whether the supreme authority in Westminster was going to be King, Parliament or Protector. It tells us volumes about gentlemen’s respect for property that the key debate in the Convention Parliament on whether to restore the King was initiated by a petition for the post of Serjeant at ...”

“... Argentine culture, and if so, what does it consist of? These questions are not discussed in John King’s otherwise informative study of the Argentine literary journal Sur, from its inception in 1931 to its slow death in the Seventies and Eighties. Yet an answer to them, however approximate, is crucial to any attempt at placing the publication in the context ...”

“... transformed for good and ill. The Market Place where Bonnie Prince Charlie proclaimed his father King James III, and where my grandfather had his office, has gone, as has the office of the Manchester Guardian, a newspaper few now remember. Against this, the Town Hall has been cleaned and restored so perfectly that it can take its place among the great ...”

“... crazed precision). After that her only reading was the Bible: Tyndale’s for preference, or the King James, since all subsequent versions were travesties of the Word. Tonks refused to republish her poetry and fiction, and became, like Roberts, a rumoured presence, a missing link. Her reappearance in this important and well-documented book, which ...”

“... It has long been accepted that neither the Union of Crowns of 1603, which saw the Scottish King James VI move south to London, nor the Treaty of Union of 1707 served to cancel out Scottish distinctiveness. In educational, ecclesiastical, intellectual and legal terms, and not only those, Scotland has always retained significant ...”

“... the paranoia which was exacerbated by the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968 and seemed to find its justification in the Watergate revelations. Richard Condon’s novel The Manchurian Candidate – an eerie anticipation published in 1959 and then turned into a Hollywood film which appeared during the Cuban Missile Crisis ...”

“... English have their houses made of sticks and dirt but they fare commonly so well as the king.’ This was possibly a traveller’s tale swelled by English patriotism, but in good times it contained some truth, and that it could be uttered and believed in its day is itself significant. Dr Palliser shows that one reason for low taxation was ...”

“... woman, Cosima, wife of his young protégé Hans von Bülow, and he has found a loyal patron, the King of Bavaria. On the last page he hears of the death of his old enemy, the German-born Parisian composer Giacomo Meyerbeer. Wendelin Weissheimer, a minor German composer and Wagner groupie, provides the epitaph by ‘bursting out into harsh laughter at the ...”

“... discipline by including previously unpublished essays on Beckett’s Endgame and Shakespeare’s King Lear, both written in a new and freer style that was (as he puts it) ‘for richer, or poorer, rather over the edge’. Since then, he has made a habit of defying professional expectations, commenting extensively on film and also on Thoreau and ...”

“... and even transvests Charles I into a baroque Margaret Thatcher, closing seven hundred pages on the King with the words: ‘He believed some principles worth adhering to whatever the repercussions – and well, he may even have been right.’ Russell will compare Ship Money to the Poll Tax, and describe the arrival of James I ...”

“... was a bare three years since the first Jacobite Rising had attempted to place the Old Pretender, James Edward Stuart, on the throne, and although the Murrays were well-known Jacobites, the family was well enough connected to ensure that, when he reached London, William was able to enter Westminster School and then Christ Church, Oxford, at both of which he ...”

“... poetry does. It doesn’t even sound like a book I’d like. It’s the story of Martin Luther King’s murderer, James Earl Ray, mostly on the run in 1968, and mostly for a couple of weeks in Lisbon, spliced with reflection on a crisis (he of course doesn’t use such a word) in Muñoz Molina’s early life twenty years ...”