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“... talked in ever less respectful terms. She was cast as the id of the Windsors, beside her twinkling mother and impeccably dutiful sister. Margaret moved with the ‘fast’ set, drank, smoked and sometimes looked bored at official events. By the end of the 1960s she was lampooned as Monty Python’s ‘pantomime Princess Margaret’ lurching around ‘in the ...”

“... would rather be torn apart by wild horses than ever again say the Catholic Mass. In December 1553, Queen Mary newly enthroned, the alderman entered his parish church to find Herne at the altar, in his old vestments and all ready to go. Speechless, the alderman simply pointed to the spectacle before him; ‘but parson herne ...”

“... gathered here at the lakeside in July 1575 to watch spectacular firework displays arranged for Queen Elizabeth by the Earl of Leicester.’ Sic transit gloria mundi: the stream was for centuries dammed to flood these meadows, producing what was at first an ample moat and latterly a grand ornamental lake, and the ruins in ...”

“... of the Ottoman imperial chancery put together a letter addressed to ‘Elzābet, who is the queen of the domain of Anletār’. It began a correspondence between Sultan Murad III and the most renowned Elizabeth, most sacred queen, and noble ...”

“... which, from around 1845 to 1861, might better be called Albertine. These were the years when the queen’s husband, Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, was largely responsible for setting the tone, the pace and the scope of the monarchy and so to some extent of the reign. Despite which, as a personality, he remained ...”

“... am a messy eater, messy altogether Rupert would say, and getting more so by the day. I’m what my mother used to call ‘a mullocks’ and once did a recital in the Double Cube room at Wilton in a velvet suit with my flies open. These days I prepare, or am prepared, for meals in an all-encompassing tea towel as if I’m going to the barbers, and before going ...”

“... Two topics are sufficiently dramatic to break through cultural isolationism: the reign of Mary Queen of Scots and the Jacobite risings. The more sophisticated English absorbers of history may also entertain an uneasy recollection that the Scots had something to do with the English Civil Wars, and may even have an ...”

“... All this really amounted to was that they had shown themselves indifferent to the fate of a drama queen whose early death spared us all a lot of tedium. Now, however, the charges include subverting the administration of criminal justice, tax evasion, squandering public money and undermining democracy. Once the Burrell and ...”

“... in the world. He was not without influential connections: his pious and intellectually formidable mother bombarded him with advice; his tutor at Cambridge was the future archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift; and his godfather, the Earl of Bedford, provided him with a seat in Parliament. But he was short of money and had expensive tastes. He became a ...”

“... the Catholic, who is Peggy Liss’s subject, seems boring by comparison: an exemplary wife and mother, virginal before marriage and chaste within it, who inspired comparisons with St Helena and the Virgin Mary. Yet the two Isabels are probably more alike than has been supposed. Both had to fight for their thrones; both had to contend with better-qualified ...”

“... the withered features of a grizzled, wrinkled old woman. This account of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots wasn’t written by Hilary Mantel or Antonia Fraser. It was written more than 140 years ago by James Anthony Froude, whose History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada put the ...”

“... time: the struggles of power and principle he sees reflected in the plays Shakespeare wrote under Queen Elizabeth. The greater part of the book explores the plays about English history: the six King Henry plays and two King Richard plays, which relate the origins and course of the Wars of the Roses, and King John. But there ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... any other restrictions on their freedom. Karina Urbach, whose last book was a short biography of Queen Victoria, provides many exemplars of this remarkable social phenomenon. Prince Max Hohenlohe noted that his family had produced ‘a German chancellor, a French marshal, a Roman Catholic cardinal, a number of ...”

“... He favoured, broadly, two types of close, confiding friend: those whom he could coddle with a mother’s love, and those whom he could shower with the tart pinpricks of a maiden aunt’s disdain. Only the most exceptional people, or people in the most exceptional of circumstances, could cause him to vacillate: but it did happen, perhaps most often with ...”