“... Its predecessor, Wolf Hall, the first part of what will be a trilogy of novels about the life of Thomas Cromwell, carried the burden of beginning and perhaps also of containing too much history.* In it Thomas Cromwell frees Henry VIII from his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, engineers his union with Anne Boleyn by ...”

“... both for political conflict and for politically charged literature. Alas, it would take more than conferences for the two disciplines to understand each other. A number of the literary critics dwelled on the fear of tyranny that was voiced in (and around) 1614 by poets and historians, an anxiety given focus by the breakdown of the short-lived ...”

“... wife and children, who eventually made their way to Calvin’s Geneva? Women were, then as now, more often in church than their menfolk. What parts did they play in the great upheavals? What brought Guillauppe Copp, Rector of the University of Paris, to leave a lucrative and honoured port to flee to Geneva (with the University seal)? What led Father ...”

“... mainstay for his German translation of 1521. By that year, Luther had revealed himself as a much more formidable critic of the state of the Church, among other things in his realisation of the power of the vernacular. All Erasmus’s writings were in Latin. In 1521, Luther’s books were publicly burned as heretical. Erasmus was moved to protest: you ...”

“... been engaged two or three times by the time she was twenty). She wrote to the 18-year-old Dylan Thomas in Swansea when he in turn won a prize in the Referee’s ‘Poet’s Corner’ and soon they were sending each other passionate worked-up letters. Thomas pretended that he was 21; when he first came to visit the ...”

“... coinage was replaced by the Commonwealth’s: the transition was swift. The frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan depicts a one-headed sovereign whose body is made up of a multitude of people. The image on the seal represents the apotheosis of the House of Commons: no one is larger than anyone else, or the institution. A member of the House has ...”

“... Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA, in the decades before the Second World War. More recently, especially on TV and film, Walsingham has been portrayed as an enigmatic figure, driven by hatred and bigotry, who orchestrated shady undercover operations carried out by a motley crew of spooks. His depiction in the 1998 film Elizabeth as a gay ...”

“... the 16th century The Age of Plunder (1976), declaring, on the first page, with the assistance of Thomas More in Utopia, that ‘the whole of English history, certainly since 1066, has been a history of plunder by the governing class and its officials and other hangers-on.’ (More had written, and Hoskins quoted the ...”

“... Could Henry VIII have friends? The pertinent anecdote is well known: he walked affectionately with Thomas More, an arm around his neck, but More told his son-in-law: ‘If my head would win him a castle in France … it would not fail to go.’ Charles Brandon fought in showy campaigns to recover those bits of France ...”

“... film will be clogging up the multiplexes. In reworkings of the Tudor soap opera, Jane Boleyn is more often known as Jane Rochford, wife of George Boleyn, sister-in-law to Anne the queen. There are some lives we read backwards, from bloody exit to obscure entrance, and Jane’s is one of them. She was beheaded in 1542, with Henry VIII’s fifth ...”

“... end of their correspondence, which spanned years 1851-79, John Ruskin, who hitherto had addressed Thomas Carlyle more or less in terms of deferential formality (‘Dear Mr Carlyle’), suddenly shifted to ‘Dearest Papa’, signing himself ‘Ever your loving disciple-son’. Whatever the immediate reasons for the ...”

“... branch of the family has inconveniently taken it on herself to enter her death throes. This is more than an inconvenience, as the whole wedding will have to be postponed, at great expense. The elders consult as to which is preferable, a wedding or a funeral. Rabbi Shorr unwisely decides to postpone the decease by means of a magic amulet, which the dying ...”

“... disease-ridden and paranoid years, had been away from court and nobody had bothered to tell them. More than that: a faction of the late king’s advisers had decided to keep his death a secret while they arranged matters. Deeply concerned about the widespread unpopularity of Henry VII’s exploitative, extrajudicial methods of government, and anxious to ...”

“... Kingsley Amis called Dylan Thomas’s life, the life told by Thomas’s first thorough biographer Paul Ferris, ‘a hilarious, shocking, sad story’. Thomas was very important to the Amis-Larkin club partly because he seemed determined not to be seen to be taking anything, including himself, too seriously ...”

“... of Portia in The Merchant of Venice. In The Winter’s Tale, the generic expectation is even more pronounced: it’s not just that the comedy includes this relocation, it’s that the relocation itself – from Sicilia to the ‘coast of Bohemia’ – secures the play as a (kind of) comedy.These are all versions of ‘green world’ plays, in which, as ...”