“... pope, who was supreme in the land. Much of the material was drawn from the fanciful romances of Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose ‘Arthurian fables’, to quote Diarmaid MacCulloch in his Life of Cranmer, ‘have met their nemesis in Walt Disney and Monty Python’. The king lapped it all up, and now so do the Jacob ...”

“... of these allusions was no doubt a result of the fact that the Brutus legend, first disseminated by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century, and more recently by Holinshed, Spenser and others, had been rendered suspect by the work of late 16th-century historians like William Camden; but by then the notion of England as the ...”

“... powerful enchantresses such as Morgan le Fay, the adversary of Arthur and Merlin, who according to Geoffrey of Monmouth ruled an island paradise called the Isle of Apples. The extent to which medieval literature created folk belief, rather than merely influencing it, is a contested topic, but there seems to have been no ...”

“... in the West Country led by his brother’s most prominent bastard, the Protestant Duke of Monmouth. Then, despite his intention of ruling as a ‘church papist’, a king whose private Catholicism would not compromise his political support for the Church of England, he began to dismantle the apparatus of the Anglican regime. This brought him into ...”