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“... been a more decidedly royalist turn in early American historiography. Brendan McConville’s The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 (2006) argues that by the time of the American Revolution colonial Whigs – far from being classical republicans – had abandoned even the ideal of contractual monarchy enshrined in the ...”

“... Zheng He brought two giraffes to Nanjing and hailed them as qilin, a gentle hooved chimera. Charles I’s chaplain, Alexander Ross, wrote in Arcana Microcosmi in 1651 that the sheer fact of the giraffe made it impossible for naturalists to ‘overthrow the received opinion of the ancients concerning griffins … seeing there is a possibility in nature ...”

“... too little to engage with it. What a strange character is Tennyson’s Arthur in Idylls of the King, for instance: the only Arthur since the 12th century not to be the incestuous father of Mordred, and at the same time the most rigorously de-Celticised and Anglicised figure since Layamon’s. What a fate for the hammer of the Saxons, the great obverse of ...”

“... be found, on the one hand, reverently keeping the religious anniversary of the ‘martyrdom’ of King Charles I, on January 30th of each year, and, on the other, on the side of liberty and against King George III in the Wilkes controversy ... he liked Lords but he is no snob; he liked women but not in the amorous way ...”

“... In the​ cold autumn of 1643 Susan Rodway wrote to ‘my king love’, her husband Robert. A candlemaker by trade, he was away fighting for Parliament and she hadn’t heard much from him, unlike her neighbours in the London parish of St Dunstan-in-the-West who all had news from their husbands. Their daughter, Hester, was just a baby and their young son, Willie, was sick ...”

“... comte de Beaumont, similarly reported from London ‘the immediate election and nomination of the king of Scotland as her successor’. Beaumont added that support for his accession as King James I of England was strengthened ‘by the fact that he has sons’ and was ‘already versed in government’ (he had been crowned ...”

“... power, superiority, pre-eminence or authority ecclesiastical or spiritual within this realm’? Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and Margaret Thatcher’s official biographer, turned his fire on the archbishop of Canterbury: ‘I do feel that the archbishop, when looking at Brexit, should remember the Act in Restraint of Appeals. After ...”

“... was part of a campaign by the self-styled Patriots to whip up support for the war against Spain. King Alfred was chosen as the subject as the purported founder of the British Navy, though there are other contenders for the title, including Henry VIII, Good Queen Bess (the pirates’ patron), Charles I and, not ...”

“... proving himself a cunning ‘politician’ in the precise pejorative sense used by Shakespeare in King Lear: ‘Get thee glass eyes,/And, like a scurvy politician, seem/To see the things thou dost not.’ So while the message of these texts is clear enough, their provenance makes them hard to interpret. The proportion of truth and invention in them cannot be ...”

“... of the tribal chiefs who have been meeting Chalabi once entertained the British, the Iraqi King and the Baathists. Their loyalty, by tradition and political necessity, is to power. That night, sitting outside in the darkness of the FIF’s desolate base, we watched flares light up the horizon. One bright flame after another shot up and floated down on ...”

“... Max Brod on Lake Garda. Brod thought d’Annunzio a superman – they treated him ‘like a second king of Italy’, he writes – but Kafka had a more laconic view. He looked small and ‘weak’, he thought, ‘skipping’ among the ladies and ‘shyly’ trotting around after Count Oldofredi, one of the show’s organisers. It was here that d’Annunzio ...”

“... in the village of Simel. The bloodshed in Mosul destroyed the belief of Iraq’s first monarch, King Feisal I, in the country that Britain had assigned him to govern: ‘There is still – and I say this with a heart full of sorrow – no Iraqi people but an unimaginable mass of human beings, devoid of any patriotic idea, imbued with religious traditions ...”

“... bringing to mind Max Miller’s celebrated appearance with a couple of potatoes – ‘King Edwards!’ – at the Royal Command Variety Performance. The potato became with great speed a staple food throughout Europe. It was greeted with especial enthusiasm in Ireland, where the moist climate is largely unsuited to the growing of wheat, and the ...”

“... who is the subject of Jonathan Scott’s biographical study, sought to incite insurrection against Charles II, and invoked the rights of ‘the nobility and people’, he made plain his assumption that the people would naturally do what the nobility told them. The assumption may surprise those historians who describe 17th-century England as a country ridden ...”

“... basic scenario’? Many onlookers have asked the question, most notable among them the sociologist Charles Tilly who, in The Contentious French (1986), engaged with a much broader swathe of French violence, from food riots to civil wars, and offered a nuanced sociological explanation. Burton, by focusing more narrowly on ‘expiatory’ violence, with its ...”