“... moral authority. The equestrian portraits of Charles owe much to Titian, but assert political power rather than bellicosity; the family pictures advertise gracious, formal, dignified amiability. A painting could suggest that nobility dwelled among the nobility, that handsome did as handsome was. Mytens went home and became a picture dealer. Van Dyck, like ...”

“... in two forms around the Peace of Utrecht: on the one hand, in the new conception of a balance of power – a phrase inscribed for the first time in the treaty – between the rival realms of Europe, an idea developed in England by Charles Davenant and Jonathan Swift; on the other, in the ideal of a federation of states to secure the peaceful unity of the ...”

“... led a Quaker consortium in buying up the land and began to look for investors. He approached Henry Bolckow, a Mecklenburg-born corn tycoon and his English iron-maker business partner, John Vaughan, who opened ironworks on the Tees in 1841. But the firm of Bolckow and Vaughan didn’t come into its own until 1850, when Bolckow rather opportunely found ...”

“... the Church had already been recognised in England. His books had been publicly burned in 1521, and Henry VIII – assisted by Thomas More, who had previously, in a learned Erasmian context, been inclined to pooh-pooh the threat – had defended the doctrine of the Seven Sacraments. The year after Luther’s Testament, More published pseudonymously, on his own ...”

“... fanaticism of the 16th century: the most sordid and shameful era in the national saga. Reviewing Henry Hallam’s 1827 Constitutional History of England, a two-volume work covering the period 1485-1760, Macaulay savaged the English Reformation: In Germany, in France, in Switzerland and in Scotland … worldliness was the tool of zeal. Here zeal was the tool ...”

“... Shardlake and his new, improved sidekick, Jack Barak, stumble across papers that cast doubt on Henry VIII’s legitimacy. Thomas Cranmer joins the action, and a couple of years later, in 1543, Shardlake enters the political forcefield of another real-life figure, Catherine Parr, soon to be the final Mrs Tudor, and the secret object of Shardlake’s ...”

“... her, it serves more subtly to characterise the victim herself: sensitive enough to respond to the power of the dramatist’s art and to recall the scene so vividly, she has neither the education nor the discipline to know anything of Aeschylus beyond this chance acquaintance – an acquaintance casually ‘picked up’ in one of those luxurious houses where ...”

“... John Singer Sargent has often been accused of lacking a soul. Even Henry James, who helped introduce him to the London scene in the 1880s and continued to promote his work, worried that he suffered from a ‘sort of excess of cleverness’. The fact that Sargent catered to a transatlantic clientele of celebrities and nouveaux riches at the height of the Gilded Age only encouraged the imputations of superficiality ...”

“... a style of drama that responded to the Globe’s diverse audience by cultivating, in plays such as Henry V, a ‘language of social inclusion’, and that exploited playgoers’ awareness of competing traditions by deliberate infraction of generic boundaries. Thus Othello takes advantage of ‘the friction between the new cynical and misogynistic comedies of ...”

“... Despite his interest in ‘rightin’ people’s wrongs’, he has been impressed by his friend Henry’s account of ‘the Nasties’ in Germany:‘They can’t be called nasties,’ said William. ‘No one would call themselves a name like that. That mus’ be what people call them that don’t like them.’‘No, it’s their real name,’ persisted ...”

“... The​ official justification for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was set out by Henry Stimson, the former US secretary of war, in the February 1947 issue of Harper’s. There had been ‘no other choice’, he said. Had the bombs not been dropped, a bloody invasion of Japan would have been inevitable, and might have ‘cost over a million casualties to the American forces alone ...”

“... centuries, European monarchs had kept exotic creatures as emblems of their wealth and power. French royal menageries dated back to the 13th century, and some of London Zoo’s first residents came from the Tower of London, where King John employed lion-keepers as early as 1210. John moved the royal menagerie from Woodstock Palace in Oxford; it had ...”

“... same night to the stage of La Martinière Girls’ School, where we performed Julius Caesar and Henry V on Friday afternoon, then moved the entire equipment across the city to La Martinière Boys’ School, where we performed Macbeth and Henry V. At the end of it we were on our way again in a convoy of cycle-rickshaws to ...”

“... in a run-down rented house four people, a white couple and two blacks, are planning to blow up a power station. The interlocking lives of the saboteurs as they wait, disguised as an unremarkable suburban household – two young married whites and two black servants – are watched by the author so intently that the peripheral business of an ape at large ...”

“... of realistic narrative. Yet if you require a novel to be one entire and perfect chrysolite in the Henry James manner, Durrell is a non-starter. His fiction is made up of wildly different elements which there is no attempt to harmonise. He has ebullient moods and phases, and he wants to get them all in. There are the great descriptive set-pieces, often ...”