“... ethnicity and whatever the quality of the dynasty’s representative at any given moment. Emperor Francis I would never have been chosen as a leader by any electoral body. Keates opens his book with the story of the Bandiera brothers. Italian officers in the Austrian navy, Attilio and Emilio Bandiera became fervent patriots, tried to lead an insurrection and ...”

“... a single non-royal person was common, even commoner than either genuinely personal monarchy, the king his own minister, or conciliar, collegial government. The question why this should have been so also yields answers which may apply to many, even most cases. The most obvious explanation might seem to be pathological: the personal inadequacy of monarchs who ...”

“... came to Buckingham Palace in 1945 to present a loyal address at the end of World War Two, the king asked who these people were. ‘Some call them Quakers, Your Majesty.’ ‘Oh,’ the king said. ‘I didn’t know that there were any of them left.’ According to the protocols of sociologists of religion, the Quakers ...”

“... is, as I write, ranked 271 in Amazon’s UK sales list (41 in the US), while the Arden edition of King Lear is ranked 13,791 (309,493 in the US). People are a lot more likely to buy books about Shakespeare’s life than they are to buy books by Shakespeare. The money generated in this way never gets through to Mr Shakespeare, of course, though he did well ...”

“... in Venice some time around Hanukkah in 1523. Calling himself ‘son of Solomon and brother to King Joseph’, ruler of the lost tribes of Reuben, Gad and Manasseh that dwelt in the far east of myth, beyond the Sambatyon (‘a river so Jewish it observed the Sabbath’), David sought (and even more surprisingly received) audiences with Pope Clement VII and ...”

“... and Paul Éluard, in the Dadaist camp, won over by its charismatic leaders, Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia, who had converged on Paris as soon as possible after the First World War. Despite the internationalism of the moment, Breton gave the Surrealist movement a national cast in the Manifesto. From the Marquis de Sade through Baudelaire and Rimbaud to ...”

“... by his father’, as one contemporary reported, to be educated and baptised. His father, a minor king in what is today Liberia, wanted Dederi to learn English so he could negotiate better trade deals, but conversion to Christianity was another advantage that might benefit the family. More than a century later, in 1754, 13-year-old Philip Quaque, a Fante of ...”

“... Margaret Jourdain has generally been assumed to have been, if sexless, a sapphic one, was said (by Francis King) to have been ‘besotted with Madge’, absolutely ‘dazzled by this woman who moved in the fashionable world’. Fans of Compton-Burnett’s astringent satiric fiction can no doubt imagine the weird and vinegary titillation of it all. Closety ...”

“... being both economical and spendthrift with the truth. Acceptable glories – the knighting of Sir Francis Drake and Sir Francis Chichester, visits by Samuel Pepys, location work for the latest Jane Austen or for Harrison Ford (more bombs) in Patriot Games – are trumpeted, while the dark history of the Greenwich marshes, a ...”

“... Ritter blocked German translations of books by the émigré historians Hans Rosenberg and Francis Carsten in the Fifties). In the next two decades a formidable array of scholars showed how much the Prussian monarchy, landed nobility, army and bureaucracy had contributed to the disastrous course of modern German history. Their mordant view of the Old ...”

“... the Scottish poet, William Drummond. In the summer of 1618, Jonson walked from London to Scotland (Francis Bacon remarking drily that ‘he loved not to see poesy go on other feet than poetical dactyllus and spondaeus’). Having been fêted in Edinburgh, he passed a few pleasant weeks in the autumn as Drummond’s guest at Hawthornden. There he bent the ...”

“... great proponents of this method in the English-speaking world: T.J. Clark on the theoretical, Francis Haskell on the anecdotal, wing’, but dismisses both as not promising much ‘as far as my interests, or the central problems of the study of art, are concerned’. Both these writers have done much to discourage the sort of confidence Wollheim exhibits ...”

“... God had declared himself: he and his ceremonies would not be mocked. (And, incidentally, the King and the bishops were right and their Parliamentary critics proved wrong.) By 1642 ritual acts were more controversial than ever. English parishioners had long been used to ministers who rejected traditional ceremonies, but some now endured a clergy which ...”

“... feel the need. It is noteworthy that despite the concern with commemorating worthies such as King Arthur and Francis Drake in 18th-century England none of the national heroes commemorated in the 19th century excited a fraction of the popular sentiment, or the artistic ability, associated with Joan of Arc in France. It ...”

“... can see, any linking principle or devices – a bag of nails, in other words. Firebird 2 is also a King Penguin (second series) which means that the ornithology of the anthology is strange. The candescent title and Lawrentian colophon testify to a fierce will to survive (perhaps also to the new style at Harmondsworth). Self-evidently, at least one rebirth has ...”