“... 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 ...”

“... a bullet-bitten stump) in Cumberland Square (now Emmet Square) in Parsonstown (now Birr) in King’s County (now Co. Offaly) in now independent Ireland. But the truth seems to be that revulsion from the martial boy began within months of the Culloden celebrations. Horace Walpole (a great source for O’Keeffe) wrote as early as the summer of 1746 that ...”

“... repackaged and resold in the 1960s as the ‘Real Folk Blues’.When Columbia Records released King of the Delta Blues Singers – a collection of tracks by Robert Johnson – in 1961, it was the first time in decades that more than a handful of people had access to more than a handful of songs by any country bluesman. Bob Dylan got an acetate from his ...”

“... Plot of 1678, English Whigs under the leadership of Shaftesbury unsuccessfully tried to exclude King Charles II’s Catholic brother, James, Duke of York, from the succession. Locke’s First Treatise was also a response to the posthumous publication in 1680 of Patriarcha by the early 17th-century royalist Sir Robert Filmer, which claimed that absolute ...”

“... they don’t understand how satire works. In 1831 Louis Philippe was foolish enough to object to Charles Philipon’s rendering of his jowly visage as a pear, poire having the double meaning in French of ‘idiot’. The Citizen King sued and the resulting trial and associated publicity provoked a proliferation of pear ...”

“... the newly elected MP for Staines – his meteoric rise orchestrated by the deputy prime minister (Charles Dance) as part of a repeatedly thwarted scheme to depose the PM (Michael Gambon) – is so outraged by the abuse directed at the government by the leader of the opposition, at the disrespect being shown to his posse, that he rises from his seat and ...”

“... were made by a brilliant young assistant, a policeman’s son from Dennistoun who was born Charles R. McIntosh, but he was not at first given any credit for the design. The plan is admirably clear, with tall north-facing studios placed along spinal corridors. The huge windows that light these studios may well have been inspired by those at Montacute in ...”

“... on a transcendent scale: just how transcendent you can see by looking at one of the tables in Charles Williams’s book, which shows Bradman, with his lifetime Test average of 99.94, almost forty runs an innings ahead of any other player, the run-rich Lara included. Not that a single hit for four would have done for me that day; I wanted to sit through a ...”

“... were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life out of the story of this king.’ To the 17th-century republicans Edmund Ludlow and Algernon Sidney, Henry would be ‘that monster of mankind’, ‘one of the most violent princes we ever had’. To Bolingbroke in the 18th century, Henry’s would appear the most ‘severe’ of ...”

“... would be infinitely more unpleasant for you than we are, so stick to us. To fundamentalists the King says: if we let the people loose, you will have a hard time. Voice your opposition, if you must, privately.’ In other words, as the banker said, ‘for the majority of Saudis politics is a spectator sport’ – and the fundamentalists are used to make ...”

“... for. On the morning of 5 June, Israel pulverised the Egyptian air force in a surprise attack. King Hussein entered the war later that day as part of his mutual defence pact with Nasser, and lost the Western half of his kingdom. The Golan Heights were the final conquest, seized just after Dayan read an intercepted cable from Nasser to the Syrians urging ...”

“... she seriously underplays the contemporary emphasis on paternal authority – the father as king in his own family. Othello’s much-debated final speech (‘Soft you, a word or two ... ’) needs to be placed in the context of a period when people flocked to public executions less for the death itself than to hear what the condemned man would say in ...”

“... burden of explanation, as William Lamont and Nicholas Tyacke have shifted it, onto the reign of Charles I and the regime of Archbishop Laud, ‘the greatest calamity ever visited upon the English Church’. Although that verdict is unlikely to go unchallenged, even those who question it should welcome Collinson’s determination to view the Jacobean Church ...”

“... monarchy declined (despite his efforts, or even because of them), while France rose. The ‘planet king’, Philip IV, was eclipsed by the sun of Louis XIV. History, or the historian at any rate, has little patience with failure. The second reason for the neglect of Olivares is the loss of most of his papers, those notorious papers which he took everywhere ...”