“... of The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. As Wotton is ‘walking the pavements of Venice, King James will be there with him’. Wotton’s innate theatricality rendered his diplomacy unpredictable and endears him to the author. Writing predominantly in the historical present, Rutter chaperones readers along Venetian alleys and invites them to ‘look ...”

“... and fierce about foreign influence, but in London and Paris she was a painter to be reckoned with. Charles Estienne, a significant French critic, became her champion, and Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia thought highly of her giant abstracts at the Musée d’Art Moderne. She painted My Hell in her studio on the third floor of the Iraqi ambassador’s ...”

“... was so well known in the Middle Ages that he was depicted on an object produced for a European king: the Catalan Atlas, attributed to the Jewish cartographer Abraham Cresques (1325-87) and commissioned for Charles V of France by his cousin Pedro IV of Aragon. Musa is shown seated on his throne, wearing a gold crown and ...”

“... of Peleus and Thetis, and one from a century later showing Achilles fighting a duel with Memnon, king of the ‘Ethiopians’; as well as an amphora depicting Ajax, in full armour, passing one of the long days of the siege by playing a board game; another shows him falling on his sword. If you don’t remember many of these scenes from Homer, that’s ...”

“... is no evidence of strong confessional conviction. After a return to Paris as tutor to the son of Charles de Cossé, Comte de Brissac and Maréchal de France, it is clear that in ‘the France of Henri II and the chambre ardente’, he enjoyed the reputation of an orthodox if undemonstrative Catholic. Buchanan appears to have left the employ of the Comte de ...”

“... resisting it. The boy in question was probably Barbauld’s adopted son (and biological nephew) Charles Rochemont Aikin, who bore his mother’s maiden name as his surname and took his father’s first name as his middle name. (Miss Aikin married Rochemont Barbauld, a teacher of Huguenot descent, in 1774.) Such latticework sums up the complex, loving and ...”

“... same way Scottish Gaeldom found it tolerable to accept the nominal overlordship of the Scottish king since that king had, in practice, no authority over it. He could not even extract a revenue from the Gaeltacht. Conversely, it is difficult to avoid the idea of a common British Isles culture in the 20th century, despite ...”

“... political connotations. The cry ‘Long live Pius IX!’ soon morphed into ‘Long live Pius IX, king of Italy!’ and to this was soon added ‘Death to the Austrians!’ or even ‘Death to the Pope’s evil advisers!’ Then, on the evening of Tuesday, 7 September 1847, the crowds who had converged on the residence of the Tuscan legation to cheer Duke ...”

“... admonition (especially the last sentence) is what I try to hold in mind when I give my sense of Charles Tomlinson’s poetry. Those who have been aghast at the churlish reviews of Tomlinson’s Poetry and Metamorphosis – Charles Martindale, who protested at Tom Paulin’s review in the LRB, and Richard Swigg who many ...”

“... still doesn’t have electricity or running water. It hasn’t had any since February 1990, when Charles Taylor – former warlord, later president, currently in exile in Nigeria, where he’s still causing trouble, according to the Coalition for International Justice, funding armed groups and political parties across West Africa – sent his militia to take ...”

“... Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect but William Robertson’s History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V of 1769, William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine of the same year, William Smellie’s 1771 Encyclopaedia Britannica and the five volumes of Hugh Blair’s exquisitely sentimental Sermons (1777-1801). Sher became the authority on the polite Scottish ...”

“... According to that view, there was not much wrong with the Church of England until Charles I and Archbishop Laud got their hands on it in the 1620s. Since 1559, the Church, episcopal in structure yet Calvinist in doctrine, had secured a wide base of support and become an instrument of national stability. The Laudians, by their destruction of ...”

“... Indian, present at the fall of the Bastille, a colonel in the militia, and had to invoke the King and the current prime minister to overcome his father’s opposition to his marriage? The answer is Robert Jenkinson, second Earl of Liverpool and eighth baronet, whose maternal grandmother, wife of a Nabob, was Eurasian. He is one of the neglected figures ...”

“... great Continental states which appeared in 1896: ‘Victor Emmanuel is the model constitutional king; Cavour, the ideal of a cool, far-sighted statesman; Garibaldi, the perfect chieftain in irregular war, dashing but rash and hot-headed; Mazzini, the typical conspirator, ardent and fanatical – all of them full of generosity and devotion.’ Mack Smith’s ...”

“... top. Entering the House of Commons at the age of 21, which was by law the minimum age, although Charles James Fox had earlier been ‘elected’ when 19, Pitt immediately made a profound impression with his maiden speech. Instead of being the usual over-rehearsed address bearing little relation to what had been said by previous speakers, it was delivered ...”