“... beside her on the bed. Esther before Ahasuerus (c.1628-30) is pure theatre, depicting the Persian king anachronistically decked out in full commedia dell’arte costume and framed by a red stage curtain; the fainting Esther is washed out not only by her days of fasting but also by the riot of colour that surrounds her. A similar stage curtain appears in ...”

“... hinged double set, trying to throw the baby Jesus across the intervening frame at the kneeling king on the left? And why was I supposed to care about the mustard-coloured pot on the mustard-coloured table with the mustard-coloured dead sunflowers in it? Pictures were another matter. You could imagine living with pictures; my parents’ house had pictures ...”

“... Conservative MP for York, hence a more successful politician. He was slightly to the right of Sir Charles Oman, the other historian MP of the early 20th century. They are now both forgotten, as no doubt I shall be in a few years. I think my books are better than Marriott’s but that is probably because they are more left-wing – or are they? A comment on my ...”

“... had been the Duke of Windsor’s mistress before marriage and that England’s recently abdicated king sometimes drank too much. A writ was served and the action heard before the Lord Chief Justice, who declared in court that ‘these particular libels, a jury might think, appear almost to invite a thoroughly efficient horse-whipping.’ Author and publisher ...”

“... retirement dinner, though of course on such occasions one is not on oath. White’s successor was Charles Osborne, whose sins as assistant director Goodman here attributes to the influence of White, though I very much doubt if Osborne, who has always known how to look after himself, would agree. The unsuccessful candidate was the late George MacBeth. The ...”

“... their church windows, and cared not a fart for any orders of the Parliament not confirmed by the king. Images were not only objects of belief: they were visible symbols of the unity of communities, and an unsuccessful symbol of unity is a symbol of disunity. Images were not an issue, like predestination, which authorities could ever hope to confine to the ...”

“... experimenting with in his free time. Ehrich, by now better known as Harry Houdini, the Handcuff King, would say years later that the released prisoner was ‘the only person in the world beside my wife who knows how I open locks’. If he’d been concentrating, he could have had quite a career. As Ehrich liked to remind the inhabitants of Appleton, his ...”

“... interest of everyone from the era’s chief ghost-hunter, Joseph Glanvill, to Christopher Wren and Charles II. A Hampshire landowner called John Mompesson imprisoned William Drury, a busker and vagrant, and confiscated his drum. Mompesson’s house was then beset by terrible knockings from inside and out. Beds shook, heavy objects were thrown about, children ...”

“... giving birth to evolution.’ ‘When a man desires ardently to know the truth,’ the pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce wrote at the close of the 19th century, ‘his first effort will be to imagine what that truth can be … It is not too much to say that next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecution of ...”

“... to Henry James. Meanwhile, Marlowe’s breakthrough blockbuster and its author were forgotten, as Charles Saunders’s indignant claim for the originality of his own play Tamerlane the Great (1681) makes clear:I never heard of any Play on the same Subject, untill my own was Acted, neither have I since seen it, though it hath been told me, there is a Cock-Pit ...”

“... own was simply taken from Machiavelli’s Discourses. When Drake comments on the Old Testament king Jehu, Sharpe supposes his remarks to be about Christ. Sharpe’s grasp of the mid-century political background likewise seems insecure. One of his themes is the impact on Drake’s reading of the political events around him. Attitudes which he had formed ...”

“... it officially was) practised religious toleration. When Henri duc d’Anjou was elected king in January 1573, only months after tens of thousands of Protestants had been massacred in his native France, he was forced to submit to a resolution which ran: Since there is in our Commonwealth no little disagreement on the subject of religion, in order to ...”

“... Leo then tells the story of a bird that could live either on land or under the water. When the king of the birds demands taxes from him, the bird professes himself to be a creature of the water and retreats there. But when the king of the fishes, in turn, demands taxes, the bird declares that he belongs to the land. Leo ...”

“... a provocatively Catholicising polemical gesture by the campaigning editors, emboldened by Charles I’s direct patronage of the project. Here, with a vengeance, was the High Church Andrewes, father of Laudianism and of later Anglo-Catholicism. Puritans, unwilling to relinquish possession of the most famous preacher of the age, but constrained by royal ...”

“... century. Both fled their home cities as children to escape racial violence: Gordon, the Robert Charles riots of 1900, in which a mob of white Southerners murdered dozens after an African American man shot a police officer who had asked what he was doing in a mainly white neighbourhood; Croll, the Odessa pogrom of 1905, in which more than four hundred Jews ...”