“... the historical caricature.Archbishop of Canterbury and five times Lord Chancellor, Arundel was Henry IV’s closest friend and ally, and one of the most eloquent orators of his time. He was a bishop for four decades and chancellor – intermittently – for nearly three. As the youngest son of the third earl of Arundel, the richest lord in England, he was ...”

“... Trying​ to describe the spectacular summit meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I which took place in June 1520, contemporaries fell into a kind of stupor. It was the eighth wonder of the world, said one. Another thought the temporary palaces – erected at staggering expense for the sole purpose of a fortnight’s worth of jousts and junketing – outdid the ‘miracles of the Egyptian pyramids and the Roman amphitheatres ...”

“... before it was the name of a style. On the divide of the physical and mental, it suggested a power to receive life’s pleasures and pains, and a less certain power to judge their worth. Such was the critical usage of the late 18th century, largely derived from Hume. Popular usage went further and has lasted ...”

“... enterprise, improvements in the use of the land, a widening distribution of political power and influence, the growth of a consumer economy and a remarkable surge in population. Not that ‘Anglocentrism’ is carried too far in Dr Palliser’s survey. We are rightly warned against exaggerating the degree of European importance and progress ...”

“... Henry VIII is the most immediately recognisable of all English monarchs, present company excepted. He has been declared a national icon, and we are told that he vies with Adolf Hitler for the exclusive attention of any secondary school pupil unwise enough to pursue the study of history beyond the age of 14. On my way to lecture on him in Cambridge once, I left my bike for repair at Ben Hayward’s cycle shop, happening to mention that Henry was on the menu that morning ...”

“... poor alike and would like to believe that justice goes all the way into the long driveways of the power elite. Sanders has said that ‘too big to fail is too big to exist,’ and he believes that wickedness in high places ought to be punished. He fits the definition of a free man given by Thoreau (among others): he has no trouble saying what he thinks, and ...”

“... One of the earliest and most prolific of this generation of more detached historians of labour is Henry Pelling. From his early account of the Origins of the Labour Party to his histories of trade-unionism, the Labour Party and the Communist Party, all models of compression and precision, he has supplied essential works of reference for anyone embarking on ...”

“... the Pilgrimage of Grace rises in the North, unhappy with reforms in the Church, and is put down. Henry VIII gets a bad leg, courts multiple possible brides, decides there are heretics both to the left and right of him, then marries Anne of Cleves in order to secure an alliance with German princes, and incidentally to protect the supply of alum vital to the ...”

“... Henry James’s injunction to the novelist was ‘Dramatise! Dramatise!’ Ezra Pound advocated ‘the presentative method’. A dozen lesser but important voices have urged that modern fiction must enact, not tell. The strongest intellectual pressures on the serious novelist in this century have all been, that is to say, in the direction – the ultimate direction – of the playscript or the screenplay and away from the elaboration of prose as prose ...”

“... In the spring or summer of 1599, the Chorus of Henry V, in Shakespeare’s only explicit reference to a contemporary politician, looked forward to the return of the 33-year-old Earl of Essex from his campaign in Ireland, ‘bringing rebellion broached on his sword’ – a light touch from which some heavy inferences have been drawn ...”

“... Much depended, I think, on whether one knew MacCarthy personally. The period of his rise to power was one in which the literary world was a good deal less remote from those of politics and social influence than it is nowadays – the degree of overlap was clearly demonstrated in Ann Thwaite’s recent biography of Edmund Gosse. Of course this doesn’t ...”

“... world is from our own as we see William slip out of it. As Regent of England for the 12-year-old Henry III, William is a public figure, an officer of state and a great baron: his death is therefore a public event, and is slowly, achingly performed over two months; it is a ‘festivity’, a ‘sumptuous death’. In front of the great barons of the ...”

“... of soul’ by treating living as an art. She also praised ‘the peculiar accent and power of his style’, perceiving that it depended upon ‘not writing well’. Yeats made the same point, and it is illuminating to find two such conscious stylists, who flourished in an era of ‘good writing’, envying Butler his lack of it. The answer seems ...”

“... contemporaries looked naturally to the health of its head, the King. At the time York spoke, Henry VI’s physical and mental state had already been causing concern for many years: always abstracted and silent, Henry had lapsed into a deeper state of withdrawal in 1453 that rendered the long-maintained pretence of ...”

“... we can believe that John felt every bit as humiliated by being forced to give up untrammelled power in England as he had by the loss of most of his French empire to Philip Augustus at the Battle of Bouvines the year before. The meadow had been selected by the barons because witenagemots had supposedly met there since King Alfred’s day ...”