“... The first draft of The Madness of King George (then called The Madness of George III) was prefaced with this note: The Windsor Castle in which much of the action takes place is the castle before it was reconstructed in the 1820s. The 18th century wasn’t all elegance and there should be a marked contrast between the state rooms, in which the King’s life was largely spent, and the back parts of the building, those tiny rooms and attics, cubicles almost, where, because the court was so crowded, most of the courtiers had to lodge ...”

“... even more true of the minor figures, such as Rhodes’s henchman Rutherfoord Harris, his partner Charles Rudd, or even Leander Starr Jameson. Paradoxically, there exists a first-rate scholarly account of Rhodes’s involvement with the annexation of Bechuanaland – yet no similar treatment of his life. Even the most recent biography (by J. Flint, 1976) is ...”

“... slender subject’. The case concerned whether a Scottish child could inherit property in London. King James VI of Scotland had acceded to the English throne five years earlier, and this was the first test to establish whether a Scottish subject, in this case the young Robert Calvin, had the same rights in England as James’s English subjects. The judges ...”

“... him closely; I gazed at him with astonishment, like a casket in which there were millions and a king’s diamonds, reflecting on all that had come from this man now sitting beside me on a small chair, and fixing my eyes on the right hand that has written so many beautiful things. Yet here was the man who has most set my heart beating since I was born, and ...”

“... of the Saxon Kings (1848), ‘last of’ has been almost obligatory in book titles, picked up by Charles Kingsley in Hereward the Wake, Last of the English (1866), and continued more recently in Hebe Weenolsen’s The Last Englishman (Hereward again, 1951) and Julian Rathbone’s The Last English King (Harold ...”

“... she had never worn – the strange and garish garment of herself’. Or, musing on her marriage to Charles and the new obsession with her stepson Philip: ‘She wished passionately that she could be the author of her own life, go back fifteen years and cross out Charles. No, not cross him out; she was very fond of ...”

“... He was irritated in July 1830 by another revolution in France, which yet again disposed of the king. Worse, there was unrest in Britain. Hay-ricks were set on fire, and threatening messages from ‘Captain Swing’ sent to the owners of the land they were on. The duke and his ministers saw to it that culprits, guilty or not, were hanged or transported to ...”

“... is here, sensibly, given to Titian’s brother Francesco – an attribution that was advanced by Charles Ricketts in his neglected monograph of 1910. His keen eye also recognised the figure of Jerome as the work of Titian himself. The exhibition provides the perfect opportunity to verify this.Unlike most other exhibitions of 16th-century Venetian paintings ...”

“... this fairyland, until, egged on by his mother, he stole a golden ball that belonged to the fairy king. On his way home he was tripped up by a couple of fairies, who took the ball and vanished. Elidyr was never again able to find his way into fairyland, but in later life he was quizzed by the bishop of St David’s about his experiences and claimed to be able ...”

“... the paranoia which was exacerbated by the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968 and seemed to find its justification in the Watergate revelations. Richard Condon’s novel The Manchurian Candidate – an eerie anticipation published in 1959 and then turned into a Hollywood film which appeared during the Cuban Missile Crisis ...”

“... plotter was a scion of the royal house of Orange-Nassau and nephew and son-in-law to the British king, but he had none of the poise and magnificence that were supposed to go with a royal pedigree. William, Prince of Orange was a mousy, middle-aged sociophobe, famous for combining blatant adultery and sanctimonious piety, and loved by no one ...”

“... and apologists. Hitler’s American admirers included Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst and Charles Lindbergh. General Motors, DuPont and IBM did business with the Nazis. So did MGM. It’s no shock to see democratic politicians cosying up to Saudi autocrats, or Rupert Murdoch or the Walt Disney Company ingratiating themselves with China’s ...”

“... in the West Country. The poet’s overbearing father, Sir Richard, and his elder brother, Sir Charles, would between them represent Exeter or Devon in Parliament with little interruption between 1743 and 1812. John Bampfylde was educated by private tutors at the family home at Poltimore near Exeter, and later at Winchester. He entered Trinity ...”

“... principles; he was sent home. On the way, his ship was detained in Southern Italy by Ferdinand, King of the Two Sicilies, then at war with France. For two years he was left to rot in Brindisi castle. In a neighbouring cell, the geologist Dolomieu, another prisoner of war, applied himself, using soot, a stick and the margins of Bibles, to the composition of ...”

“... struggled to replicate both the successes and the legitimacy of Rome. The ‘Spanish Empire’ of Charles V was, in effect, one part of a much larger polity at whose heart lay the Holy Roman Empire, the self-declared heir to Rome. This was something to which Protestant England could never hope to lay claim (although before the separation from Rome Henry VIII ...”