“... a ditch as having fallen off a log. In either case the suicide’s property will be saved from the King. We can, Murray says, sometimes catch suicide ‘in the act of running away’. The juicier stories come from France, like that of Philippe Testard, a mad merchant who kept giving his money away and once, at the elevation of the Host in the Mass, lifted up ...”

“... the Russells also gave Britain its last Whig prime minister, Conrad’s great-grandfather, Lord John Russell, later the first Earl Russell, who governed as a Whig from 1846 to 1852 and afterwards as a Liberal. If his own family history helped to bring into focus the indeterminacy of political commitments on the eve of the Civil War, it was his encyclopedic ...”

“... the resurrected Christ. On both scores, as well as one or two others, I found myself outclassed by John Stanislaus Joyce, who was ‘head of family’ at the house in Royal Terrace, Clontarf, when the 1901 census was taken. I have a copy of his return framed in my loo, and it shows, rather boldly, that he, his wife Mary and their ten children were all Roman ...”

“... more often acknowledged than explored. Fox’s concern is the imaginative literature of the age of John Skelton and Thomas More, and then of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey: literature which he believes to have been gravely undervalued, and which he commends not only for its intrinsic pleasures but as a rich historical source. What the most ...”

“... strip them of the sense that they, too, were hidalgos, with leaders who were more royal than any king or sultan; they were the nobility of Jerusalem ‘that is in Sepharad’, as the prophet Obadiah had said, and as Bishop Alonso de Cartagena reiterated; and their leaders were reputedly of the stock of King David. To ...”

“... which passed through the president’s neck and then through the body of the Texas governor, John Connally; and Oswald’s own murder while in police custody at the hands of Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner. Despite these anomalous features, Kennedy’s assassination was – conceptually speaking – a straightforward event. While academic historians ...”

“... for a male heir through six successive brides produced only one legitimate son, and when young King Edward died in his teens, it left Edward’s half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, to succeed to the crown. Both had survived various indecisive marriage negotiations proposed by their father, and once liberated from much male interference as reigning ...”

“... to have some justification. Yet it is rarely so obviously justified as in the case of Professor John Elliott’s rediscovery of a major Spanish statesman of the 17th century, the effective ruler of Spain for more than twenty years and the contemporary, the rival and the opponent of Cardinal Richelieu. A choleric man, obsessed with honour and reputation, it ...”

“... was the only surviving portion. In 2002, Worden identified the deist and republican John Toland as the person most likely to have transformed ‘Ludlow, the builder of a godly commonwealth’ of the 1650s into ‘Ludlow, the radical Whig or “real Whig”’ of the 1690s.This enduring deception would appeal to Robert Harris, whose Selling ...”

“... The three universities of medieval foundation were essentially undergraduate colleges, but, as John Durkan has shown, Scots as students and teachers had roamed abroad since the 15th century to the higher faculties of the Northern universities – some to England, but far more to the Continent. While they were to be found in significant numbers from Louvain ...”

“... of ‘God Save the Queen’ on the Thames, a rebellious parody of the Royal River Pageant. John Lydon won himself a place in British folklore. But for all the mock outrage over the Pistols’ anarchic antics and seditious lyrics, none of those involved – among them Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood – faced criminal charges. The performance was ...”

“... The romance of Apollonius of Tyre opens with the classic fairy-tale couple: the king and his daughter. Antiochus is powerful, she is beautiful, and of marriageable age – there is no mother. The difference is that, in this variation, she will not leave home to marry a prince, for her father Antiochus ‘began to love her in a way unsuitable for a father ...”

“... and shall devour the work of the dog.’ This would happen in the year 1624 from the birth of the King of the Jews, whose coming was predicted and after whom the years would be counted. Later, a dig in the area turned up a new scarith with a text in Latin and Etruscan, as could be verified by authentic if undecipherable Etruscan inscriptions surviving in ...”

“... all of the time; the drama turns around the small moments of morality and human feeling. It’s King Lear, but played for laughs – a Molièrean take on the theme of renunciation, rather than a Shakespearean one. At the same time, Succession is a merciless depiction of how capitalism works. The world of the show is a drama, but it’s also just business ...”

“... or Byronic about him. Though his funny face had great charm he was the reverse of handsome: John Sparrow, in one of his feline mots, remarked that ‘the trouble with Cyril is that he is not so beautiful as he looks.’ But he was a living repository of nostalgia, and of the most stylish sort of self-pity; and these, if properly served up, can be a ...”