“... against the French army, with added vituperation against Napoleon and the collaborationist king of Bavaria. It seems that only ten copies had been sold when the incredulous Palm was arrested, hurriedly tried and repeatedly shot in a botched execution three weeks later. Even though the news of this judicial murder caused widespread revulsion, especially ...”

“... the heart and burned the ashes, banishing the revenant for ever. In A Natural History of Ghosts, Roger Clarke retells ‘the first true modern ghost story’, from Pliny’s letters, about a house in Athens haunted by ‘an old man, emaciated and filthy, with a long beard and unkempt hair’, who rattled his chains and drove the inhabitants to illness and ...”

“... to be discharged carefully. ‘You are his shadow,’ he warned Buckingham, and since ‘the king himself is above the reach of his people,’ his shadow could be stamped on instead. Few favourites lasted a reign, let alone a regime change. As Sir Henry Wotton said, ‘the state of a favourite is at the best but a tenant-at-will.’ Favourites could find ...”

“... money, and money to buy the favours of young girls. The quotation is from Neal Ascherson’s The King Incorporated, published more than thirty years ago. Many stories deserve retelling for each generation; and the tale of Leopold’s duplicity, lubriciousness and greed, and of the cruelties and depredations with which his hirelings in the Congo Free State ...”

“... law, all those declared purus idiota (a quasi-medical category ruled on by a jury) belonged to the king, who could bestow them and their property on any party able to make a strong enough case to claim them. (‘Begging for a fool’, as this was known, was often financially motivated.) Fools could also be acquired circumstantially. Those who were established ...”

“... horned helmets as like as not. We know what they did: rape and pillage. Along with the Crusaders, King Arthur and Robin Hood, they form a major part of our medieval imaginary. For fifty years now specialists in Viking studies have been trying to convince us, without much success, that ‘Viking’ is a job description, not an ethnic category, that behind the ...”

“... smaller in stature’. Now I come to think of it, though, that might interest an alien. Francis King, in his autobiography Yesterday Came Suddenly, writes as straightforwardly as he has always done. Every so often in the course of his long career as a novelist critics have spoken of the detachment of his style, nearly all of them meaning it as a ...”

“... the son of an Exeter tanner, appeared at Oxford’s north gate claiming that he was the rightful king of England. John said that he was Edward I’s true first-born son, swapped out in the cradle by a negligent nurse. He was brought before Edward II who sarcastically greeted him, ‘Welcome, my brother,’ and intended to keep him as a fool. But who was ...”

“... books survive: Wormald’s is to write the history of a period dominated by two authors, Bede and King Alfred, and to break free from the patterns created by those two great men without in any sense diminishing them. Bede remains a giant figure: the greatest English historian of all time. For two reasons. Not for 400 years after his death was there another ...”

“... with elegant epistles’ which he had painstakingly written. The opening letter in Roger Kuin’s superb new edition of his correspondence, addressed to the 12-year-old Philip by his father, Sir Henry, urges him ‘to exercise that practise’ in letter writing, ‘for it will stand you in most steed in that profession of lyfe that you are ...”

“... her specific role in Bloomsbury, and what differentiated her from others in the group. James King’s new biography, punctilious but pedestrian, gives us an opportunity to think anew about these questions, condensing, as it does, twenty years of scholarship and research since Quentin Bell’s classic two-volume Life came out in the early Seventies. The ...”

“... it, over culture – has anything to say to us. Francis Dunlop and, one assumes, his publishers, Roger Scruton and Jessica Douglas-Home, have no doubts. Scheler, Dunlop suggests, was addressing ‘a political situation not unlike our own ... a breakdown of the old order, loss of the sense of community, triumph of material values, depersonalisation, anarchy ...”

“... the early 20th century, the only English monarch who was both male and monogamous was probably King George III. Put the other way, this means that from Nell Gwyn to Mrs Keppel (and beyond), the courtesan was an integral part of royal history. But while much is known about such women as the Duchess of Portsmouth, Elizabeth Villiers, Henrietta Howard and the ...”

“... prototype. While modern French scholarship busies itself with probing the dreams of the poem’s king in order to uncover a ‘feudal libido’, can we recapture the dreams that troubled the original Charlemagne (a light sleeper, as it happens)? Already in the Early Medieval period people were in the business of making images for themselves and investing ...”

“... young Prince Charles, and must have impressed him because he was appointed the first Master of the King’s Musick in 1625, on the death of James I. Like his father, Charles was very interested in the arts (he had been well tutored by the Duke of Buckingham), and in ambition he far outstripped him. Soon after the funeral, Charles sent Lanier to Italy to ...”