“... tumult was especially consequential. At the end of February, after bitter fighting in the streets, King Louis Philippe, the beneficiary of the July Revolution of 1830, fled Paris. The resulting power vacuum was filled by a provisional government assembled in great haste from a list drawn up by newspaper editors and acclaimed by delirious crowds. A new ...”

“... Home Rule party and its leader, John Redmond. Ever since Parnell had been hailed ‘the uncrowned king of Ireland’ in the 1880s, the majority of nationalists had supported the parliamentary campaign for Home Rule, hoping that Westminster could be persuaded or cajoled into devolving government. Though Gladstone’s bills of 1886 and 1893 had failed – the ...”

“... to the archives.2 Beside him are Thomas Sackville, earl of Dorset, and the earls and cousins Charles and Henry Howard. All three were Byrd’s patrons, and to various degrees shared the shifts and ambiguities of his religious convictions; it was odds-on that all of them would have conformed to a restoration of Catholicism in England if it had happened to ...”

“... were taken between 6.30 and 9 p.m., so major matters often weren’t debated until after midnight. Charles Forbes, MP for Malmesbury, complained in 1825 that ‘bills which concerned India were constantly introduced at a late period of the session and were regularly passed at a late hour of the night’. The Commons sometimes didn’t adjourn until four ...”

“... Elizabeth, equally determined in her way, had to bypass a number of unattractive facts. The king was a martinet on bad terms with all of his sons and the straitlaced, almost literally unbending Queen Mary a formidable mother-in-law, yet neither stood a chance against her flood tide of affection. Other references in the letters make it clear that she ...”

“... aesthetic peccadillos. He is traced mainly through his lengthy projects as Surveyor-General of the King’s Works, the chief office he held from 1669 until his late, peremptory dismissal at the age of 86 in 1718. Thus the biography sometimes turns into a catalogue of building designs, from university commissions such as Trinity College Library to the host of ...”

“... Napoleon Bonaparte and his chief diplomat, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, are usually seen as the oddest of history’s odd couples. One personified boldness, ambition and overblown operatic passion; the other, subtlety, irony and world-weary cynicism. One displayed such restless physical energy that contemporaries repeatedly reached for that newly hatched adjective ‘electric’ to describe him; the other was sickly, pallid and had a club foot ...”

“... breaking out of its familiar four walls and beginning to move (quite literally, if we think of Charles-François Daubigny’s floating workspace on the river). Some studios, like Moreau’s, sloughed off any pretence of domesticity and achieved cavernous proportions. At the 1937 Paris World Fair, where the European dictatorships faced off against one ...”

“... by the career of Martin Beckman, a Swedish mercenary tasked with arranging fireworks for Charles II’s coronation in 1661; he held the post of royal fire master for the next forty years. Unfazed by confessional differences, Beckman put on great shows that lightened the royal coffers and set fire to Londoners and their homes – even after 1666, when ...”

“... went for the laugh. Jackie said it in a thoughtful, reflective way; he showed the side that made Charles a great king afterwards.’ A year later MacGowran made his London debut as the Young Covey in The Plough and the Stars, becoming friends with its author, Sean O’Casey. In 1956 in London he played – to much critical ...”

“... hair curiously similar to that of Farrah Fawcett-Majors, backed by astrology charts and holding a King Charles spaniel. One just has a drum-kit that says Blondie on it and a guitar like a horse’s neck, with veins. Harry says she had noticed in her own drawings and paintings ‘some subtle reference to my own face when I was drawing someone else. I have ...”

“... can get away with this debate as to who precisely, as between him and the future King of England, is whose dog, because the Henry IV plays give him peculiar authority. This is an authority that works not only inside the plays but outside them as well. One of the few early stories, rare but trustworthy, that come straight from Shakespeare’s ...”

“... of rural festivities, reflecting the protracted propaganda campaign on their behalf by James I and Charles I. Marcus is open to the attractiveness of the carnival sprit, which had its own radical generosity, setting aside traditional hierarchies and roles in the name of a less individualised sense of humanity. But by the 17th century, when her story ...”

“... also in self-deception. Owners of social houses aspired to make them powerhouses, to entertain the King and members of the Cabinet. But insofar as high politics remained a country-house pursuit, it was still carried on in the homes of the Derbys, Devonshires and Salisburys, who despised ‘middle-class monsters’ – be they buildings or businessmen. The ...”

“... of the ‘rules of war’, and that James II lacked legitimacy because he was no longer legal King of England. He was surely a king to the Irish who fought at the Boyne, and for that reason a threat, not only to the religious unity of the Williamite settlement, but to its whole territorial integrity. The early 18th ...”