“... ambassador to England, recorded in 1529 that he had spoken to an embroiderer who was busy removing Thomas Wolsey’s arms from a set of magnificent vestments. Had these been sent by one of the institutions founded by the cardinal, perhaps wishing to maintain the longevity of a valuable item by removing a tainted association? Or had the vestments been ...”

“... 121 in Selter’s diary, written while she is hiding in her own house listening to her husband, Thomas, as he goes about his 18 November again. The kettle boils, rain falls, shopping is put away, documents are printed. He pees. A fire is lit, and the house goes quiet. Thomas is reading. Then he goes for a walk. Tara ...”

“... and protected; his greatest ‘labour’ is the burden of carrying his own fool’s bauble. In Thomas Nashe’s comedy Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1592), the fool, Will Summers, trips lightly onstage, half-dressed and unburdened by any of the things regular courtiers have to worry about: ‘without money, without garters, without girdle, without a ...”

“... inventor of the pocket handkerchief predictably proved no match for his battle-hardened cousin, Henry of Lancaster. Tricked into surrender at Conway Castle, Richard was brought south under heavy guard. Although he was still accorded all the honour due his kingly status, his subjects could not fail to observe that, throughout the ceremonies of royalty, the ...”

“... Marshal, first Earl of Pembroke, who rose from relative obscurity to become regent for the young Henry III and one of the most powerful men in Europe. Marshal’s craftsmen used fast-grown trees for the door’s outer face and a powerful lattice of slow-grown timber for the reinforcement inside: no expense spared, no older wood reused, nothing but the best ...”

“... of life’. They are listed ‘by doctoral degree or current position’, all the way from ‘Henry F. Schaefer, Nobel Nominee, Director of Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry, U. of Georgia’ down to ‘Richard Sternberg, Invertebrate Zoology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution’ (would he be higher up the list if he ...”

“... The final day of monastic life at Evesham witnessed the standard process of surrender by which Henry VIII’s government took possession of these ancient and supposedly perpetual corporations; but someone decided to add extra pointed drama to the occasion – probably the abbot himself, Philip Ballard alias Hawford (medieval Benedictines tended to acquire ...”

“... bewitching a cow belonging to Pynchon’s servant Francis Pepper. Another of Pynchon’s servants, Thomas Miller, cut his leg with a saw and immediately assumed that Parsons was responsible. Up to this point, Mary had kept quiet about the fact that she had given herself to the devil and that her soul, leaving her body, had attended a witches’ meeting. But ...”

“... only pebble on the beach’ was the title of a 19th-century song that has become a saying. ‘Dear Henry,’ William James wrote to his physician friend Henry Bowditch, ‘you see that you are not the only pebble on the beach, or toad in the puddle of senile degeneration.’ ‘What is a pebble?’ is the opening sentence of ...”

“... the regime, were destroyed. The French ambassador said she was ‘above eighty years old’ when Henry VIII had her beheaded, while the Imperial ambassador said she was ‘nearly ninety’. In fact she was 67. The chronology defeated observers, as if her life stretched back into a fabulous era when dragons roamed. Susan Higginbotham’s carefully written ...”

“... There was no shortage of bastards in the early 16th century, but Thomas Cromwell stands out as one of the biggest bastards of them all. His surviving correspondence shows the energy, efficiency and brutality of someone born to get things done. Whenever he says, ‘I remain still your perfect and sincere friend,’ you can be fairly sure he is about to terminate the addressee’s career with extreme prejudice ...”

“... of England, the Elizabethan antiquary William Harrison told not one but two stories about Henry VII. ‘As the report goeth’, he wrote, the king had had all the mastiffs in England put to death because ‘they durst presume to fight against the lion, who is their king and sovereigne’. And again, ‘as some saie’, the king had beheaded one of his ...”

“... public attention with pastiche and forgery. Chatterton not only invented the character and work of Thomas Rowley, supposedly a Bristol monk, but also carefully presented it in faded ink on artificially aged parchment, strangely intent on fooling connoisseurs of medieval literature such as Horace Walpole, author of the earliest Gothic novel, The Castle of ...”

“... at him: ‘It is a merye worlde when such as thou arte shall teache us what is the truth.’ Thomas Tomkins, a weaver, was burned after Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, had forcibly shaved off his long evangelist’s beard ‘so he wold loke like a catholike’ even if he wasn’t one, and had held his hand in a candle flame to give him a foretaste of ...”

“... The first thing​ people noticed about Henry, perhaps the only thing they noticed, was his droopy left eyelid. He was blond, of medium height for the times and pleasant looking, but otherwise unremarkable. Nobody ever claimed that he was clever. Later on, exasperated chroniclers denounced him as ‘simple-minded’, ‘senseless’ and ‘useless’ – simplex, insipiens, inutilis ...”