“... themselves on the British imagination. One of these was the massacre at Kanpur, where the Maratha king Nana Sahib turned against a corps of about a thousand Europeans, laying siege to their cramped entrenchments. After a punishing fortnight under fire, and some 250 deaths, the British surrendered with a promise of safe passage to Allahabad. But as they pushed ...”

“... through state and society in these years came from the very top. As prince of Wales and then king, Edward VII gambled, had mistresses and corrupted his protectors into indulging his whims, while his son was linked to the sordid allegations about aristocrats and male prostitutes in Cleveland Street. Edward was particularly obsessed with dress, which ...”

“... of her ability to ‘speak and write pure Latin, Greek and Hebrew’. ‘But can she spin?’ the king asked. John Gallagher relates this story and many like it in Learning Languages in Early Modern England, in which he assembles a rich body of documentary evidence to illustrate the methods and social importance of instruction in vernacular languages. While ...”

“... of liberty as independence. The work of Algernon Sidney, another Whig icon, who was executed by Charles II in 1683, gave a similar neo-Roman reading of liberty. In Sidney’s posthumously published Discourses Concerning Government (1698), slavery was identified with dependence on the will of another, regardless of that person’s actions. The thrust of ...”

“... blinded with the self-love of your own counsel in holding together of this parliament’. Even the king who owed him so much wasn’t convinced that Cecil held the key to the political process. Administrative skill wasn’t everything in early modern politics. Among those who conceived of the political process in very different terms was Cecil’s sometime ...”

“... the so-called ‘fishing fleet’ to search for a suitable husband. She and a young officer called Charles Langford-Hinde did fall in love, and Langford-Hinde stowed away with her on the ship back to Britain, but he was discovered, arrested and thrown off the ship at Aden. He would die soon afterwards in an ambush at the North-West Frontier.So, a nicely ...”

“... sixth century, wished to found a convent. One who aided him, in his fundraising, was Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths.In AD 539, the Frankish king Childebert I arranged for combats of gladiators in the Roman arena.The earliest form of the parish church of Notre Dame de la Major, on the highest eminence of the city, was ...”

“... draws inspiration from 18th-century and Romantic writers: a verse recipe in the manner of William King, 21 ‘Vignettes’ based on engravings by Thomas Bewick, and some distinctly Wordsworthian landscape poems feature in his collection. But where Clampitt hops about dottily – despite the decorous appearance of her stanzas – snatching at bits of Keats and ...”

“... TV, and was re-released in the cinema to coincide with Welles’s return to the Broadway stage as King Lear. In America especially, the era of the art-house, the film-society circuit, film magazines and film schools began. Andrew Sarris launched the cult of the auteur. His key thesis was Citizen Kane: The American Baroque, in which he described Kane as ‘the ...”

“... which is not the scene of de la Mare’s engrossing stanza: Who said, ‘Peacock Pie’? The old king to the sparrow. Who said, ‘Crops are ripe’? Rust to the harrow. It is solid stuff: the more we repeat it the more true facts emerge. The old king’s words are at once a threat, a gibe and an ironical comment ...”

“... Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of Charles Lamb (the ‘gentle-hearted’) – but the broad allusion did pretty much what was wanted, assuring the theoretically advanced that they were now top dogs. Condescension usually has an anxious motive. Eliot, as Tom Paulin is on hand to say, was working ...”

“... the editor managed to suppress it (‘the veriest twaddle’). This snapshot – one of many in Charles Williams’s biography – reveals two factors in Beaverbrook’s success. The first is that posh English society was no match for him. He was ‘vulgar’, but there was a charm in his self-promotion which made languid ladies and gentlemen want to be on ...”

“... performing a castration and no place wished to be associated with it. In 1770 the music historian Charles Burney tried to discover where these operations were conducted, but failed: I was told at Milan that it was at Venice; at Venice, that it was at Bologna; but at Bologna the fact was denied, and I was referred to Florence; from Florence to Rome, and from ...”

“... Eugénie Servières’s Inès de Castro and Her Children Throwing Themselves at the Feet of King Alphonso IV of Portugal (1822) was both a richly coloured medieval history, and, as Spies-Gans suggests, a dramatisation of the subservient position Servières herself occupied: she had written repeatedly to the French government that year, requesting a ...”

“... courtier, eager to win honour and wealth not available in the Basque country by service in the king of Spain’s entourage. Once Loyola’s plans for the Society of Jesus took shape, they were made possible by his courtier’s sense of how to charm and persuade the powerful to look favourably on his vision: not least his skill in influencing noble ladies ...”