“... didn’t work out as planned. In 1967, Robert Hill, an editor at Pope’s American publisher, J.B. Lippincott, decided to give another writer he’d spotted a chance to fill the gap in the market. He wrote to Patrick O’Brian, who duly signed a contract headed: ‘Untitled novel about an 18th-century naval adventurer’.Hill’s attention had been caught ...”

“... were hundreds of similar stories. Strangways was himself a victim. The man who proclaimed the king’s return to the town had been captured at the castle in 1645, imprisoned in the Tower of London and heavily fined. By 1660 he was in his mid-seventies and the years and defeats had taken their toll. When it was time to read the proclamation, his voice was ...”

“... the nature of the imperial institution in Japanese history. It was as if in 1952, on the death of King George VI, the German press had offered up fervent prayers that the Firebomber of Dresden would go to his just reward in Hell, or as if the Argentinians were to hold the Queen personally responsible for the Belgrano. The incident was a sobering one. The role ...”

“... ruler to react to this change of location was Henry IV, who in 1400 wrote a letter to the ‘King of Abyssinia, Prester John’. The fascination with Ethiopia did not stop there, for news broke, in 1441, that an Ethiopian delegation was to attend that year’s Council of Florence. The Pope was reportedly much moved, even though the delegation turned out ...”

“... the population of England – over whom, Southern remarks, he was a ruler more effective than the king could ever be. We have, as it happens, a copy of the words that he later spoke to the Pope about his notion of his responsibilities. ‘When I became a bishop I believed it to be necessary to be a shepherd of the souls committed to me, whose blood would be ...”

“... a greenroom nut or a stage-door Johnny to follow Antony Sher through every day of the year of his king (Richard III) without occasionally finding your breath unbaited. This ‘Actor’s Diary and Sketchbook’ offers us Mr Sher’s every waking thought, and a few un-waking ones, from the moment the possibility of his ...”

“... up to a dynamic body lie lumpen, inert. An organism becomes matter, nothing more. ‘Dying King’ (1963) In Dying King (1963), by contrast, the doomed ruler falls to the ground while still vainly warding off the coup de grâce. It’s a gesture, Frink said, that she owed to the final moments of Laurence ...”

“... of treasons drawn up in 1351, it was an offence to ‘compass or imagine the death of our lord the king’. The meaning of these strange words was already archaic in the early 1790s when William Pitt’s Government brought an array of British radical reformers to trial for high treason. The words ‘compass’ and ‘imagine’ had entered the English language ...”

“... that he doesn’t want to read any more books that don’t begin: ‘A shot rang out.’ Richard Cobb’s second volume of autobiography, nominally about Shrewsbury and Oxford, opens with a man getting off the boat train at the Gare Saint-Lazare wielding (well, almost wielding) a blood-stained axe. The killer, an old schoolfriend of Cobb’s called ...”

“... There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face,’ said King Duncan in the fourth scene of Macbeth. But there was, and Shakespeare knew this. Almost at the moment he was writing the play, a new law required that anybody who professed ‘a knowledge of phisnognomie’ – one version of the name by which the practice of reading character in facial features was known to the learned – was to be ‘openly whipped untill his body be bloudye ...”

“... films. Much of Selznick’s work was inspired by his boyhood reading. Apart from the freakish King Kong, his most characteristic Thirties productions were lovingly middlebrow adaptations of books. The best was probably David Copperfield (1935), with W.C. Fields as Micawber; one of the worst, three years later, was a plodding Tom Sawyer. Was Selznick wary ...”

“... There is a church in Fleet Street, almost opposite El Vino, where Richard Baxter used to preach in 1660. Baxter’s reconciling, ecumenical attitude toward churches and public worship is still maintained here, at St Dunstan’s-in-the-West. The first thing you notice is an exotic Rumanian screen, for St Dunstan’s is much used by members of a Rumanian Church in communion with the Church of England ...”

“... I first encountered King Solomon’s Mines in the children’s section of a public library in Harare. Most of the books smelled of water damage and many had been taken out so rarely that the last ‘return by’ stamp pre-dated Mugabe and decimalisation. I was working through shelves of books about horses and morality tales written by women who manifestly did not like children, and took King Solomon’s Mines because it’s set in ‘the Manica country’, a province a few hundred miles east of Harare ...”

“... de Chartres, soon to become the duc d’Orléans, placing him next in line to the throne after the king’s immediate family. Cosplaying as a man of the people following the outbreak of revolution, he changed his name to Philippe Égalité and in 1793 voted for the death of his cousin Louis XVI (he too would die at the guillotine later that year). In ...”

“... Republican England, as presented by Dr Hutton, shows a surprising amount of vitality even in 1659. Richard Cromwell’s regime appears as enjoying a considerable body of support, and there is much food for thought in the fact, illustrated by the career of General Monck, that on the whole Monarchy and Protectorate, through the crises of 1659-60, drew support ...”