“... The legend of King Arthur must be the most enduring legacy of the Middle Ages. Everyone knows it: children, scholars, readers of comic books, movie-makers. The scenes and motifs associated with it – Excalibur, the Round Table, the adultery of Guinevere, the return to Avalon – are more familiar than anything linked to real medieval kings ...”

“... vision of upholstered modern life, as well as the tastes of its royal owners, Queen Mary and King George V. There was a working toilet made by John Bolding and Sons, and a gun room stocked with Purdey shotguns powerful enough to shoot flies. Artists created hundreds of paintings and books for its clubby, masculine library. Harold Nicolson gamely ...”

“... season to restore the throne to him. Turn and turn about, it is the throne that moves and not the king. Five minutes I remained at the foot of the coffin, until I understood how unequivocal was the stillness and the silence. And I the only person in the room. I moved round to the side and touched his hand: toneless clean chilled meat. Another minute gazing on ...”

“... invest emotionally in claims by their rulers to powers of blessing, or baraka (Morocco’s King Hassan); to the prestige of holy or sharifian descent from the Prophet Muhammad’s family (Jordan’s King Hussein and King Hassan); to the guardianship of Islam (the Saudi royal ...”

“... no stable, no animals. ‘Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem,/ Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews?’ In Pasolini we see more faces: all looking as Italian as Charlton Heston, say, playing Moses, looks ...”

“... electorally it died in 1980 or even earlier. There will be similar controversy over the role of Michael Foot: did he lead it to its death or did he just accompany it? Was he one of the physicians who killed it, or was he merely the undertaker? The most remarkable feature of Labour’s history is not its short life, but its striking lack of success during ...”

“... a half yards of red livery cloth issued to Shakespeare as a token of his new status as one of the King’s Majesty’s Servants might be as significant as the company’s move to a new playhouse; and for Shapiro it was almost as important to understand the structural underpinnings of that theatre as to explore the material foundations of Shakespeare’s ...”

“... it does very little for a man’s appearance’); eerier still to see a distorted after-image of King Lear set loose in a Western desert, ‘like some scurrilous king stripped of his vesture and driven together with his fool into the wilderness to die’. In another cultural register, Western fans will recognise a scene or ...”

“... there could. He suggests that not long ago the most dangerous agent of a foreign power was the King; and the second most dangerous was the King’s lover. Both were sympathetic to, and possibly active agents for, Mussolini and Hitler at a time when the British Government was about to declare war on Italy and Germany. Mr ...”

“... has disappeared. So it was with one of Rome’s most flamboyant enemies, Mithridates VI Eupator, King of Pontus. He had cheated death for decades, at the hands of family, of ostensible friends, of many a declared enemy. Time and again he had checkmated Rome’s most formidable generals, or at least those who were not too busy checkmating one another in their ...”

“... seems to have got the message upside down. In the poem the writing on a ruined monument to the ‘King of Kings’ says ‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ The poem then concludes: Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.David sees the dead human population around ...”

“... answer would include the English victory at Neville’s Cross the same year, which ended with King David II of Scotland a prisoner in the Tower, to be joined ten years later, after Poitiers, by King John II of France. Some might argue – and professional historians no doubt prefer multi-factored answers – that the ...”

“... Piedmontese. Maximilian was so depressed he dreamed of becoming Belgian, like his father-in-law, King Leopold. A Saxe-Coburg princeling whose first wife had died in childbirth before she could inherit the British throne, Leopold had been installed as king of the new Belgian state created by the 1830 revolutions. Having ...”

“... in a more aristocratic and accomplished manner, complete with emblematic fruit, by John Michael Wright’s c.1668 painting of James Cecil, fourth Earl of Salisbury and his sister Lady Catherine, now at Hatfield. Unhelpfully, there is no indication on the canvas as to the pear-bearing girl’s identity, and no date either. However, a modern brass ...”

“... fatefully twice, at the Battle of Zama and in Asia Minor during the Roman war against the Seleucid king Antiochus III, where Publius Scipio served as his brother Lucius’ legate and Hannibal was a guest at Antiochus’ court. Livy has an anecdote about them meeting and exchanging views on generalship, but the whole episode is deeply improbable. It is not ...”