“... was not an act of God but an avoidable tragedy.These two submerged villages are central to Richard King’s oral history of Wales – or, really, of Welsh-language activism and Welsh nationalism – in the late 20th century. The injustices and catastrophes caused by the government in Westminster weren’t the only thing that stimulated Welsh activism during ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... stand. Their nation, of whose actuality they seem to possess only the frailest knowledge: Prince Charles, already well into middle age, was surprised to learn from a bibliomane that Charing Cross Road had once been the centre of the London book trade. He is constantly bemused by farmers using pesticides.What they do feel they know is that their subjects ...”

“... appropriate career of a mercenary. By 1579, when James, at the age of 13, made his formal entry as king into Edinburgh, Montgomerie was there to write two poems that clearly were meant to accompany pageants. For the next few years he was a court poet and apparently, in a very minor way, a favourite of James, who gave him a pension of five hundred marks in ...”

“... representatively on the loose – James Brooke of Sarawak, John and Henry Lawrence of the Punjab, Charles Gordon, Lawrence of Arabia, William Sleeman who destroyed Thuggee, Frederick Lugard who conquered Northern Nigeria. If such men became proconsuls it often diminished rather than brightened their radiance. At that level, Imperial energy and Imperial virtue ...”

“... as a precedent for 1688 the revolution of the 1640s, which had culminated in the execution of Charles I. Often described as the Great Rebellion, the earlier revolution was for conservative Whigs a monumental embarrassment, not least on the Feast of the Blessed Royal Martyr every 30 January, a day when some Whig preachers opted for prudent evasiveness on ...”

“... by the Scots and had been finally resolved, years later, in Ireland when James II, the last Stuart king, was defeated at the Battle of the Boyne in 1689, it was downright alarming to go home and see TV footage of riots at Orange parades that showed this supposedly definitive and long-past battle was actually still in progress, and that nowadays the people on ...”

“... and other vicious attacks, including Shelley’s depiction of him as Purganax, the chief of King Swellfoot’s council of wizards in Oedipus Tyrannus or Swellfoot the Tyrant – have condemned Castlereagh in the eyes of posterity. Castlereagh’s suicide in 1822 – he cut the carotid artery in his neck with a small penknife – reinforced the ...”

“... consistently satisfying. It is announced at the opening with the declaration that the support of Charles I’s Government for the drainage schemes illustrates the absolutist tendencies at work in that regime. Yet it is soon apparent that such projects were attempted before Charles’s reign, by a client of Burghley under ...”

“... the throne in 1520, when he was 26. That may sound young, but he was in good company: Francis I, king of France since 1515, had been born in the same year as him, and Henry VIII (crowned in 1509) was three years older. Charles V was installed as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519 at the age of nineteen. Still, Suleyman had large ...”

“... interest-free loans – provided by Tice – into donations. Fiona Cottrell, an old girlfriend of King Charles, has given £750,000 over the past year. Her son, George, who has served eight months in a US jail for wire fraud, is among Farage’s most trusted lieutenants.But while the prospect of $100 million from Musk has receded, there are signs that ...”

“... until 1650, but was privately circulated in 1640, when Parliament was finally convened by Charles I for the first time in 11 years, and members of the Short Parliament were vociferously denouncing the king’s attacks on liberty. Later that year, Hobbes fled to Paris in fear that his absolutist views might put him ...”

“... performed by John Banks’s splendidly over-the-top costume drama The Island Queens (banned under Charles II in 1684, rewritten and rehabilitated under Anne as The Albion Queens, 1704), during which Mary and her victorious antitype Elizabeth enjoy the first of their many apocryphal but irresistibly dramatic meetings, this one a dreamlike and overwrought ...”

“... he was a supplier of headgear à la mode to an upmarket clientele which had at one time included King James’s fashion-mad consort, Queen Anne, and he was – not least – a familiar acquaintance of Shakespeare. A rather respectable figure, it may seem from this summary, an immigrant success story, though there is also some evidence to suggest ...”

“... Jerusalem, had not woken in the night with a terrible thirst and sipped the water forbidden her by King Solomon, peeved by her refusal to sleep with him, and in his own palace, too. He had to make do with her slave girl, but stipulated that the Queen should take nothing from the palace or she would pay the penalty. She scoffed at the idea that he might have ...”