“... daughter of that legendary debauchee, Maurice de Saxe, who’d in turn been a bastard son of the King of Poland. So in George Sand, née Aurore Dupin, the Ancien Régime was crossed, give or take a bar sinister, with the Paris proletariat, and once she was grown up, and France had gone back to having a king, she could in a ...”

“... you accord him the ultimate homage, and become an Elvis impersonator, remaking yourself as the King right down to the Queen Bess high collars and the heel-shaped sideburns the size of Italy; or else your favourite Elvis story will be the one in Albert Goldman’s biography, of how he nearly drowned in a bowl of minestrone soup – so bombed out one day on ...”

“... as something of a surprise to remember that thirty years before the Armada, Philip of Spain was king of the country he later attempted to invade. What was more, he had been a new kind of king, the consort of England’s first ruling queen, and one to whom England had violently objected before he had even set foot ...”

“... Laudanum, Kenelme Sexnoth Pope, H.N. (Helga Nevvadotoomuch, c/o Lord Godmanchester (Gumster), The John Peelcroft Hadmanchester Podgoets, Night Slide Clubb, P.O. Box 1AA, BBC-wise, W.1, and others. The translations were just as elastic as these cartoon-rubber composites. In the Robert Lowell version actually used by the Sunday Times, ‘Spleen’ opens: I’m ...”

“... bred that hearty Race of Mortals who won the Fields of Cressy and Agincourt . . . The Renown’d King Arthur is generally looked upon as the first who ever sat down to a whole roasted Ox (which was certainly the best way to preserve the Gravy), and it is further added that he and his Knights sat about it at his Round Table, and usually consumed it to the ...”

“... politics. But what Hutton calls the ‘new model of ancient Celticity’, introduced in 2010 by John Koch and Barry Cunliffe in Celtic from the West, sees the spread of Celtic languages as a consequence of the existence of an Atlantic trade route rather than ‘waves of invasion’. Trade doesn’t necessarily bring peace. Slave shackles have been found at ...”

“... or deepen my grasp of human possibility, as in their different ways the history of Thomas More or John Milton does. The extant marks of Shakespeare’s mortal passage don’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the world or the human. The works – various and ambiguous as they are – tell us something about both; the life doesn’t. Instead, far ...”

“... classroom-based teaching with online learning’. The new model has been piloted at Ark’s King Solomon Academy in the Borough of Westminster, and Ark staff have travelled to the US to visit the ‘reknowned [sic] Rocketship schools’. Rocketship Education is a chain of charter schools – publicly funded but privately managed – in ...”

“... there could. He suggests that not long ago the most dangerous agent of a foreign power was the King; and the second most dangerous was the King’s lover. Both were sympathetic to, and possibly active agents for, Mussolini and Hitler at a time when the British Government was about to declare war on Italy and Germany. Mr ...”

“... as the family banquet on Christmas Eve, the visit to the Sick Children’s Hospital to hear the King’s speech through the PA on Christmas afternoon, and visits to wealthy patients of my father’s some way up the twin river valleys from Aberdeen, I might well have run away screaming, tearing off my Graham of Montrose kilt and matching trews (tartan ...”

“... it found no ‘credible’ or ‘meaningful’ evidence of a conspiracy to assassinate President John Kennedy, and the words are of course a sore temptation to suspicious eyes. Do they mean, as they seem to mean, no real evidence at all? Or no evidence to speak of; no evidence you could act on; plenty of evidence but all of it shaky; plenty of evidence but ...”

“... vision of upholstered modern life, as well as the tastes of its royal owners, Queen Mary and King George V. There was a working toilet made by John Bolding and Sons, and a gun room stocked with Purdey shotguns powerful enough to shoot flies. Artists created hundreds of paintings and books for its clubby, masculine ...”

“... valley of the shadow of death; make a joyful noise; go from strength to strength . . . The 1611 King James Authorised Version of the Book of Psalms – and of course of the entire Bible – is so deep in the English language that we no longer know when we are repeating its phrases. Inextricable from the beliefs and practices of its faithful for four hundred ...”

“... political, constitutional, social and economic. Yet it is difficult to get away from the king-centred approach, because the one point around which every historian of the 15th century can unite is that Henry VI was an extraordinarily bad king. Not ‘bad’ in the sense of cruel or tyrannical, just hopeless. There ...”

“... few illusions about the strength of his mandate to rule, even asking the lords who acclaimed him king whether they did so truly, from their hearts, or only from their mouths. An unstable mixture of plots, rumours and prophecies soon proved his fears to be justified. Rebels disguised as New Year revellers attempted to surprise him with his family in January ...”