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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... protested that this was the sort of arbitrary behaviour for which Cromwell had lambasted the late king, and demanded that the unjust tax be repaid to him. Cromwell first tried to browbeat Cony into submission, then threw him in prison. Cony’s lawyer, the eminent Sir John Maynard, demanded that he be set free, and the judges in the case were minded to ...”

“... leading Churchillists was convened in Austin, Texas, undoubtedly at the initiative of Professor Wm Roger Louis, whose Kerr Chair of English History and Culture at the University of Texas was one of the two principal sponsors (along with the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library), although the president and staff of the hyper-rich Pennzoil Company and sundry U of T ...”

“... standard early modern slang. (Rochester famously wrote of Charles II, with no implication that the king was cheerful: ‘Restless he rolls about from whore to whore,/A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.’) Curll’s obscene publication, flogging a single schoolboy joke to death, apparently also won an avid readership and a reputation for daring wit. A ...”

“... Northampton’s Catholicism did him no disservice politically. James I’s accession brought in a king who/always favoured his mother’s supporters and who owed a debt to one who had backed his cause from the start. In 1603, at the age of 63, Northampton became for the first time an important public figure and he remained so till his death 11 years ...”

“... the 1850s and 1890s, to a collection of agates, alabaster, quartz and jasper put together by Roger Caillois, a collaborator of Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris, to a vitrine displaying tiny artworks made from split lengths of human hair, collected by the artist Susan Hiller, to Richard Wentworth’s snapshots of traffic cones or abandoned gloves or old ...”

“... perhaps especially to, people who don’t like Russell Crowe: he doesn’t impersonate the Fox CEO Roger Ailes so much as turn into him). McBurney’s Murdoch is, like the real one, an unusual combination of direct and evasive. Logan Roy is more straightforward. When asked why he’s confident his children will do what he wants them to do, he answers, with a ...”