“... of Bath’s Tale’, Chaucer has the Wife declare that her tale is set long ago, in the days of King Arthur. Back then the land was ‘fulfild of fayerye’, and the elf queen danced with her company in the green meadows. But that’s all over now. The elves and fairies have been driven out by the friars, who have blanketed the country with prayers and ...”

“... For Eliot, as for many Anglo-Catholics, Andrewes was an iconic ancestor figure. Along with Richard Hooker, George Herbert and William Laud, this ‘right reverend Father in God’ seemed to embody Catholic continuity and spiritual moderation. The English Church, these men believed, had maintained amid all the upheavals of the Protestant reformation a ...”

“... survived as long as the Empire itself, but otherwise Seeley was neglected until in recent years Richard Shannon and Sheldon Rothblatt both identified him as a leading figure in the reorientation of the Victorian élite. Plainly there was scope for an intellectual biography to match the ideas to the man, and the task was undertaken as a PhD by Deborah ...”

“... with acuity on Madison and Jefferson and on Jack Ruby (the assassin of Kennedy’s assassin) and Richard Nixon. He is the closest thing the New World has to a Chesterton or a Burke. Who better to reflect on the relationship of sin and power, of eros and daring, of charisma and catastrophe, than an American pilgrim whose journey has taken him from William ...”

“... of Aragon and so fell from favour, Cromwell somehow managed seamlessly to enter the service of the king. He eventually came to fill much of the large gap left by the portly cardinal, from whom he learned a number of tricks for reconciling the law to the will of the king. No one understands exactly how the son of a blacksmith ...”

“... him and her uncle, Raymond of Antioch. Much later, as queen of England, she represented her son Richard I while he was on the Third Crusade. At a humbler rank, the Cistercian monk Thomas of Froidmont wrote a Life of his heroic sister, Margaret of Beverley. Having gone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1187 while Saladin was besieging the city, Margaret assisted ...”

“... swan’s down, a pinch of panegyric and a soupçon of sedition. Leave to ferment in the blood of a king. That would produce most of the verse of this period, in which conventional elements are graciously reassembled in posies for readers to sniff and to pluck. Consider this delicious morsel of anonymity, ‘On a Lady Sleeping’, plucked by Peter Davidson from ...”

“... send-off. He was, after all, the longest-serving capo of them all, a man who commanded respect. King Hussein of Jordan would have laughed to see his adversaries courting his son and heir, King Abdallah II. Spectators could almost hear Hafez al-Assad of Syria whispering into the young ...”

“... tell us what to do and think. In this sense, in a democracy, the ordinary citizen is effectively a king, but a king in a constitutional democracy, a king whose decisions are merely formal, whose function is to sign measures proposed by the executive. The problem of democratic legitimacy is ...”

“... personal danger, and even when times were good his reforming zeal was always constrained by the King’s theological conservatism. With Henry’s death, the close shaves were apparently over and Cranmer could at last begin to build a truly reformed Church under the new Josiah, Edward VI, with the aim, as MacCulloch repeatedly documents, of making England ...”

“... politicians, brand-names and underwear we connect with a quite different kind of writer. The King of Spain (identified only by various nicknames, Solus, the One and Only, Only You, the Lone Ranger and so on), appears in Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, and Mrs Thatcher (recognisable from her lipstick, her manicure and the fact that she is called ...”

“... Before we come to Philip’s internal strife, we have to contend with the randy bonhomie of old King George. It is said that American viewers are distressed to find the word ‘cunt’ used in the first episode, spoken by George VI (Jared Harris) to his valet, but perhaps this is merely the latest in a long line of gifts from Britain to the former ...”

“... to English religion and government. The intelligence agent William Herle wrote that Philip II, the king of Spain, hated English Protestants ‘with an immortal hatred never to be reconciled, esteeming them worse than either Turks, Marranos, Jews, or Infidels, the blasphemers of God’s holy name and of his son Jesus Christ’. ...”

“... ends. Four years of rage and lies; four years of racism and xenophobia so coarse and inflammatory Richard Nixon might have blushed; four years of dismantling economic and environmental regulation, packaged as a populist revolution on behalf of the forgotten (white) American; four years of ‘law and order’ indistinguishable from moral and political ...”

“... park, is a definition ‘governed by the idea of privilege – the privilege granted by the king to his wildlife to live in freedom and safety within the afforested areas of his kingdom’. This defence of privilege and, by implication, of royal hunting makes for profoundly uncomfortable reading if one comes to it with a gut abhorrence of blood-sports ...”