“... fragments survive, is a lyric version of the story of the tenth labour imposed on Herakles by the King of the Argives. Ancient Greek legend has it that Geryon was a winged red monster with three heads who tended a herd of magical cattle, helped by an equally monstrous two-headed guard dog. Stesichoros repeats the story of how Herakles stole Geryon’s herd ...”

“... But Margaret Pole, one of the great magnates of Tudor England, is not overlooked. In The King’s Curse (2014) she was ground up by the great fictionalising machine that is Philippa Gregory, and in 2003 she was the subject of a major biography by Hazel Pierce: Margaret Pole: Loyalty, Lineage and Leadership. Pierce’s book is thorough and ...”

“... systems, sending a tremor through individual lives, wrecking certainties, reorganising identities. Elizabeth Marsh was one of those shaken by the times she lived through, her personal ‘ordeal’ intimately connected with global forces beyond the grasp of any individual then living. Conceived in Port Royal, born in Portsmouth, she ‘travelled further and ...”

“... heaven’; he is quite ‘drunk’ with it. Walter Raleigh pined like a spurned lover when Elizabeth I turned her attentions to the Earl of Essex. George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham, told James VI and I that what they enjoyed together was ‘more affection than between lovers in the best kind’. Lucy Hughes-Hallett wonders, in her biography of ...”

“... because it made him seem indispensable. Two hundred years later, another childless monarch, Elizabeth I, had John Hayward imprisoned in the Tower for dedicating a book on the events of 1399 to her rebellious former favourite, the Earl of Essex. The queen found it seditious even to broach the topic of a past tyrannicide; Essex’s supporters planned to ...”

“... events were the Reformation, when it lost its monks and lands and found its finances insecure, and Elizabeth I’s subsequent decision to make it a Royal Peculiar. This put it outside the jurisdiction of the Church of England, answerable only to the monarch, and left its dean and chapter in charge of its affairs. Since then, royals have turned up for ...”

“... to be set alongside Henry’s own authority, and the initiatives he instigated. To dismiss the king as ‘a narcissist who saw exercising control as his birthright’ is to ignore the workings of his shrewd and ambitious mind. The king was no idiot, and he rarely ceded control to others. Guy and Fox suggest that Anne was ...”

“... to furniture fittings, plasterwork and murals. These arts flourished under both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, as wealthy householders sought to surround themselves with beautiful and edifying objects to guide charitable behaviour. Unlike paintings on panel, such decoration wasn’t intended for prolonged contemplation: that, after all, would encourage ...”

“... tiers, and Roe remarked how ‘this sitting out hath so much affinity with a theatre … the king in his gallery; the great men lifted on a stage as actors; the vulgar below gazing on.’ Two months earlier, Roe described a durbar held in Burhanpur by Jahangir’s son, Parvez, as being akin to ‘a great stage’, with Parvez seated like the ‘mock ...”

“... such as this cry out for psychological explanation, and an attempt to provide it has been made by Elizabeth Wirth Marvick, in The Young Richelieu. The attempt is bravely made, and it rests on solid archival research in the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Archives, the British Library and other places. Yet, though the attempt to provide a psychological ...”

“... 20 July 1554 and married Mary Tudor five days later at Winchester Cathedral, where he was declared king ‘de jure uxoris’, though Parliament refused to let him be crowned, to his considerable annoyance. If Mary had borne him a son, there would have been a Habsburg dynasty in England. Unfortunately, her ghastly gynaecological difficulties, which may have ...”

“... other people who shared these views – as many did and do. Take the Duke and Duchess of Windsor: King George VI and Queen Elizabeth knew, Harris writes, that the Duke ‘was irresponsible, insensitive, feckless. He never paused to consider the implications of what he said and did. They put nothing past the mesmeric ...”

“... Yet all the time he knows she is ‘hurrying to join him’. Creating an imaginary fresco of King Candaules awaiting his wife on the nuptial couch, Anthony Powell observes that the expectant monarch has in him ‘something of all men’, his spouse absorbed in her own rituals ‘something of all women’. In the legend, Candaules dies for thinking his ...”

“... was made safe in Norfolk and Suffolk, if not so far in Europe. And then, at Norwich on 21 August, Elizabeth was for the first time publicly celebrated (by the poet Thomas Churchyard) as a Virgin Queen. The significance of this little piece of provincial theatre, a proposal not to marry, relates to the master-card in the 1578 strategy of appeasement: a royal ...”

“... the oath of succession. He was prepared to swear to the succession itself, which he believed that King and nobles were entitled to change, but was unwilling to swear to the preamble of the Act, since by doing so he would be denying Papal authority and implicitly rejecting the validity of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. From 1527 he had been the ...”