“... The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) leader, John O’Leary who, in Yeats’s poem, shared his grave with the corpse of ‘romantic Ireland’, observing that the Brotherhood’s ‘propagandist work was … entirely separatist with practically no reference to Republicanism’. Similarly, and just as ...”

“... personal danger, and even when times were good his reforming zeal was always constrained by the King’s theological conservatism. With Henry’s death, the close shaves were apparently over and Cranmer could at last begin to build a truly reformed Church under the new Josiah, Edward VI, with the aim, as MacCulloch repeatedly documents, of making England ...”

“... the 1960s on the last page of Campbell’s hard-eyed reconstruction of the legend, ‘and I am King of the Universe.’ When we met in England, Ginsberg had abdicated another impromptu throne, as King of the May (Kral Majales) in Prague. He had been expelled for taking off his clothes during a reading to his student ...”

“... formidable ally with ample weapons stocks, which nursed a long-standing animosity, reciprocated by King Hassan II and his government, towards the largely pro-Western monarchy on its western border. East Timor and Western Sahara are post-colonial narratives in the proper sense; and how badly they read. General Franco’s death followed within a year and a half ...”

“... who rules in their native Thebes; in the battle, the brothers kill one another; Creon, the next king, orders that Eteocles be buried as a hero, Polynices left unburied as a traitor; Antigone, the sister of the dead men, defies the order and symbolically buries Polynices; Creon condemns her to an underground prison; there she hangs herself, and Creon’s son ...”

“... covers the Middle East but not Algeria, he pulls no punches. ‘Reporters,’ he writes, ‘know King Fahd to be lazy, corrupt, ignorant and a drunk, but little is written about these things and he is still the West’s man.’ Prince Sultan, the Saudi Defence Minister, is one of the Kingdom’s biggest ‘skimmers’, making billions out of arms ...”

“... of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem that is even older, about the adventures of the historical king of Uruk, who ruled in the 27th century BCE. The indentations on the tablet report that the gods sent a flood to destroy mankind, and that one of the gods, Ea, warned Utnapishtim, king of Shuruppak in southern Iraq, who ...”

“... infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet, Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hour With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. The novel at a crucial point reaches the same mood as well as the identical locale; and Stetson’s corpses ‘planted last year in your garden’ are ...”

“... security services are on the look out for terrorists, not journalists. All the same, ‘furious’ John Reid, the defence secretary, has ordered an investigation. Let’s assume for a moment that the male line of the monarchy is under threat. How to safeguard it? Perhaps a royal sperm bank is in order. There used to be one for the seed of Nobel Prize ...”

“... thread-makers and embroiderers Christiana of Enfield, Catherine of Lincoln, Maud of Canterbury, John Machon, Alyse Darcy, Alice Catour and Thomas Bell could be added those of Alexius and Andronicus Effomatus, Greek ‘workers of damask gold’ (drawn gold wire) in London; John of Cologne, a German immigrant working for ...”

“... over four generations of both men and women – indeed, her letters make Margaret Paston, wife of John Paston I, one of the most prolific woman writers in Middle English. She repeatedly urged her husband to come home, to pursue the family’s interests from Norfolk rather than London; it is our good fortune that he didn’t. The intimacy of the letters can ...”

“... Lords. His speech was a passionate defence of the Nottingham weavers – followers of the mythical King Ludd – who had been smashing the new mechanical stocking-frames; and for the rest of his life Byron went on arguing that ‘we must not allow mankind to be sacrificed to improvements in mechanism.’ But what might have happened if the enemies of mechanism ...”

“... War as a cultural conflict is not new: it goes back to William Chillingworth, preaching before the King in 1643, and saying all the scribes and pharisees were on one side, and all the publicans and sinners on the other. What is new here is the meticulous investigation, town by town and village by village, of the growth of tension between these two groups. The ...”

“... waist, Henry VIII was fat, they thought twice about saying so and in Holbein’s portraits of the king his bulk is translated into an image of monumentality and strength. The female pharaoh Hatshepsut was portrayed in sculpture as slender with delicate features. The discovery in 2007 of her long-lost mummy revealed that she was enormously fat. At the heart of ...”

“... of Aragon and so fell from favour, Cromwell somehow managed seamlessly to enter the service of the king. He eventually came to fill much of the large gap left by the portly cardinal, from whom he learned a number of tricks for reconciling the law to the will of the king. No one understands exactly how the son of a blacksmith ...”