“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was a reasonable expectation that she would find her place in Poets’ Corner, near the grave of Charles Dickens and the bust of Thackeray. Why has it taken a century to bring this about? In giving notice of her death her husband, John Walter Cross, who had married her in St George’s, Hanover Square, scarcely eight months before, alluded to her wish to be ...”

“... In​ 1660, a Commonwealth warship called HMS Naseby sailed to the Dutch Republic to bring the new king-in-waiting home to England. During its journey the ship was renamed the Royal Charles in honour of the Restoration, but her figurehead – a vast carving of Cromwell on horseback, wearing laurels and ‘trampling six nations under foot’, as John Evelyn put it – remained in place ...”

“... are both in their twenties and snappily dressed, are the noble Jean de Dinteville, ambassador from King Francis I of France to Henry VIII, and his friend, perhaps alter ego, Georges de Selve, who had been given the small see of Lavaur near Toulouse to provide for a career in the royal service. Dinteville was in England from February to November 1533; de ...”

“... made any other man discard me’. The Duke even put up with her having an illegitimate child by Charles Grey (later of the Reform Bill), though she was exiled for a year. Of course, he was not in the best position to complain since, on top of the daughter he had fathered before he married, he had himself had two children by Lady Elizabeth Foster ...”

“... of 16 when the Revolution broke out. Like many aristocrats, he hoped he might loyally serve his king under a liberal constitution, but this became increasingly impossible, and after his marriage to a granddaughter of Malesherbes he found himself swept up in the brutalities of the Terror. Many of his wife’s family and Malesherbes himself were executed, and ...”