“... 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 ...”

“... In​ 1676, during the period of colonial conflict known as King Philip’s War, Reverend Hope Atherton was the chaplain accompanying Captain William Turner’s militia on their march to an Algonquian encampment near Deerfield, Massachusetts in the Connecticut River Valley. There they ambushed the sleeping tribe, slaughtered some of them and drove others into the river, which swept them over the waterfall – now known as Turners Falls – to their deaths ...”

“... most of the colonists, couldn’t see it, but to the ingenious theologians, anxious to serve their king and their Church, it seemed providential, precise and even practical. To Bartolomé de Las Casas, however, another Dominican, later Protector of the Indians and Bishop of Chiapa in Yucatan, the line was too fine. ‘False testimony, a contrived argument for ...”

“... men, and young women ‘of ungovernable temper’. Conolly’s twists and turns were satirised by Charles Reade in Hard Cash, where he appears as Dr Wycherley, ‘bland and bald’, and inclined to ‘found facts on theories instead of theories on facts’. Both Conolly and Browne interested themselves in phrenology, the contentious study of bumps on the ...”

“... relations with a number of comparatively obscure Victorian authors – John Hanning Speke, Charles Reade and Margaret Oliphant – as well as some reflections on the rise of literary agents. There is a good deal of entertainment in these case studies, most consistently in the chapter on Speke, the Nile explorer. Having staked £2000 to win the bidding ...”

“... a set of dinnerware as a prenuptial gift for Princess Elizabeth. Tupperware was presented to King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia and the Maharaja of Ender, and in 1948 the Tupper ‘Millionaire Line’ of houseware won a major award from the journal Plastics World. But the reputation of plastic was so mixed (some kinds disintegrated; others were malodorous or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”