“... in which he died on a makeshift altar; the brazenly Christ-like representation of his dead body by David; the renaming of Montmartre (Martyr’s Mount) as Montmarat; the chant of ‘cor de Jésus, cor de Marat’ as members of the Cordelier club carried his heart through the streets of Paris. What did this imitation really amount to? Did it simply express a ...”

“... before the Reformation, The Stripping of the Altars, they have now made things even with David Daniell’s William Tyndale. Tyndale’s life is soon told. He was born, probably in 1494, of a landowning and entrepreneurial family in that part of Gloucestershire where the Cotswolds meet the Severn, since then the home of Evelyn Waugh (temporarily: the ...”

“... one hundred years, as the House of Windsor has evolved into a wealth-creating machine which even King Midas might have envied. It is to the unravelling of this extraordinary development that Phillip Hall has devoted the last ten years of his life, and as a result, he has produced a fascinating, indeed sensational book. Between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 ...”

“... progress of the Vikings from raiders to settlers to would-be conquerors: an attempted invasion by King Sweyn of Denmark three years later was abortive, and though Norwegians continued for many years to control the Scottish islands in the far North, their effect on the British mainland was negligible.But if you take a more romantic view, the First Viking Age ...”

“... exhibition. One unfamiliar painting is hard to leave behind. This is the extraordinary picture of King David holding a lira da braccio and looking down on a priest who kneels in prayer before him: a work recognised by Mina Gregori as by Moretto nearly twenty years ago, and which has not been seen in public in Britain for two hundred years. It was once ...”

“... took his pulse in disbelief. Now, the monk’s mechanical likeness, commissioned by a pious king for an impetuous son, would offer similar testimony to the power of saintly bodies. The automaton resides today in the Smithsonian, reminding us of humanity’s long-standing desire to create life that survives death – an impulse once fulfilled through ...”

“... schools. It is the apparent similarity between the third and fourth waves that animates Desmond King’s Making Americans. Yet his deeply researched and closely reasoned book has ambitions well beyond its immediate subject. He isn’t much concerned with the motives or circumstances that prompted these people to migrate in the first place; and he is only ...”

“... he shaped the course of events. At the Restoration he had to counter the charge that the day the King was executed was chosen to conform to his prognostication. Through the key years of the Civil War he had forecast Parliamentary victory and royal defeat (he predicted victory at Naseby, the key battle of the war), and Royalists complained that his almanacs ...”

“... Eighty-six people died in the Waco siege in April, including the ‘prophet’ David Koresh and 17 children fathered by him. David Leppard, a crime reporter with the Sunday Times Insight team who covered the Waco story, describes well and knowledgeably the appalling build-up of weapons in the compound of the Branch Davidians’ ranch and the information and assumptions that led the two law enforcement agencies involved – the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and the FBI – to make a series of disastrous errors ...”

“... and ill-considered) reaction against the generous concessions made to Egypt at Camp David: the war in the Lebanon was the second. Arik Sharon, who dates the start of his planning the war from the day he took office as Minister of Defence in July 1981, spelled out his views in a (Jewish) New Year issue of the muck-raking weekly Ha’olam ...”

“... Australians), they seem to have been unembarrassable. Yet that’s not how it worked over here. David Laws’s 22 Days in May, which recounts the negotiations that preceded the formation of the coalition government from the inside, explains how it happened that in our case the winners actually ended up winning. Hardly surprisingly, it’s not that Lib Dem ...”

“... pointed to the influence of malevolent advisers, little known to the public. Was the president-king the toy of courtly intrigues?The decision to dissolve the Assembly, and the manner in which it was taken, reminded everyone of the awesomeness of presidential powers in the Fifth Republic. A British prime minister can call a snap election, but Parliament ...”

“... Anthony Weldon, who is assumed to be the grumpy courtier author of The Court and Character of King James (1650), thanked God the Stuart family had been ruined. His assessment of James as ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’ has stuck, as has his unflattering physical description: ‘his tongue too large for his mouth, which ever made him speak full in the ...”

“... royal, the infant to whom they were given was unquestionably so, being none other than the future King of Kings himself. Monarchs, this story reminds us, not only make benefactions they also receive them – which adds a suggestively majestic connotation to the otherwise plebeian notion of ‘give and take’. British sovereigns have until relatively recently ...”

“... Young Things. Think of George VI, Elizabeth and the two young princesses, ‘we four’, as the King observed with characteristic precision, ‘the royal family.’ And think of Elizabeth and Philip, whose domestic felicity was proclaimed to the world in the BBC documentary which was inevitably entitled Royal Family. At first glance, it might seem ...”