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“... For sure circa Regna tonat. This comes as close as it was possible to get to criticism of a king who interpreted criticism as treason and who medicated treason with murder. ‘Wyt,’ the poem mourns, ‘helpythe not’ in demonstrating innocence. It is a punning lament, for neither wit nor Wyatt himself can change the mind of Henry VIII. ‘My head ...”

“... progress of the Vikings from raiders to settlers to would-be conquerors: an attempted invasion by King Sweyn of Denmark three years later was abortive, and though Norwegians continued for many years to control the Scottish islands in the far North, their effect on the British mainland was negligible.But if you take a more romantic view, the First Viking Age ...”

“... White-collar felonies were supplemented by what might be called dinner-jacket offences. Sir Charles Dilke was undone by the mendacious accusations of Virginia Crawford, and Parnell by his liaison with Kitty O’Shea. And then there was the Marlborough House set. It says something for the atmosphere of those years that among Lewis’s clients were some ...”

“... Oliver Cromwell and organised in Parliament, aroused the English proletariat to make war against Charles I, the High Church and the aristocracy. Having vanquished them, Cromwell then turned against his erstwhile class ally, the many-headed multitude, which during the course of the struggle against the King had developed a ...”

“... by Marx and Freud. These towering influences, together with Vilfredo Pareto, Graham Wallas and Charles Beard, all served to undermine his faith in reason, and led him to search for deeper drives which underlay the rationalisations of doctrine. He was surely right to mistrust pure reason and be aware of the impure motives which gave it such potency: but was ...”

“... Lilly deftly connects the heavenly cataclysms with those below: ‘I say this Conjunction findeth [King Charles] engaged in an uncivill and unnaturall War against his own Subjects, the English Nation.’ In all this, as it turned out, Lilly was correct. These events were both unprecedented and unnatural in contemporary terms; they escalated into a final ...”

“... who is ideally placed to traffic between the land of her birth and her adopted homeland, the way Charles Simic has done since the 1960s with Serbia (see his anthology of Serbian poetry, The Horse Has Six Legs, and his numerous single volumes of Lalic, Tadic, Ristovic, Salamun and many more). I wish her patience, talented originals, and many ...”

“... of common pleas. In 1613, at Bacon’s urging, James moved him, against his will, to the court of King’s Bench. Although Coke was called lord chief justice, the post carried no peerage and he was never ennobled. This enabled him, when the king finally dismissed him from judicial office in 1616, to return to the Commons as ...”

“... bound up with form – and, in particular, the question of what happens when an image (of a king, for example) is mediated three or four times. It is in part why Collier seems to speak to our contemporary moment. His Trompe l’Oeil with Print of Charles I after van Dyck is an oil painting of a mezzotint print of part ...”

“... works blowing over from Newington Butts. She was 77 years old, a relic of the days of mad King George. She had outlived both her husband and her son. It was her daughter-in-law Caroline, now married to a clerk named Eastwood, who was with her when she died. There were no obituaries. It was a small event in a small corner of the metropolis; a drop in ...”

“... and turns against the architect of the match, Thomas Cromwell, who is beheaded on the very day his king marries Katherine Howard, niece of Cromwell’s arch-enemy the reactionary Duke of Norfolk (who in Mantel’s version resembles an ungenial version of Sir Ector in T.H. White’s Sword in the Stone). As Thomas Boleyn, Anne’s father, puts it in The Mirror ...”

“... radio broadcast: ‘You must believe me … found it impossible … to discharge my duties as king … without the help and support of the woman I love.’ The woman he loved, the American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson, is more vividly drawn, an art deco clothes horse in Chanel and Cartier, standing beside him through the long years of what became, in ...”

“... Supplement. The anecdotal evidence at the centre of the row concerns the case of a pupil from King Edward’s School in Birmingham, who is predicted to get five As at A-level. Bristol didn’t offer him a place; he’s going to Cambridge. It’s an outrage. Never mind that Bristol would have known that it was more than likely Cambridge would make him an ...”

“... it. A visit to a sea cave at Ballybunion produced these lines from (or worked into) Idylls of the King: So dark a forethought roll’d about his brain As on a dull day in an Ocean cave The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall In silence ... These are lines to which Keats, and perhaps nobody else, might have ...”

“... On​ Christmas Day 1788, the king hid his bedclothes under the bed, put a pillowcase on his head and hugged the pillow, which he called Prince Octavius and said had just been born (Prince Octavius had died five years earlier at the age of four). When George realised what day it was and that he had been kept in his straitjacket and not allowed to go to church, he suddenly went under the sofa, saying that he would converse with his saviour there, and that no one was to interrupt them ...”