“... one of them is dignity, a quality defined, after Andy and Fergie, more by its absence. The late queen can be held responsible for much, but nobody could accuse her of seeming to enjoy her role. For the Yorks, however, enjoyment was everything, and the notion of royal sacrifice, arguably a red herring in the House of ...”

“... not yet clear how involved Lilibet II will be in palace matters but, under the influence of her mother and her yoga instructor, the preferred adverbs are likely to be ‘honestly’, ‘amazingly’, ‘insanely’ and ‘unbelievably’. Harry is deep in the sycamores of Montecito with his ghostwriter, grassing on his grandma, and they’re keeping it ...”

“... George Elliott Sweet in 1956 argued that Elizabeth I was the true author: ‘When would a busy queen have time to write plays? … It is a well-known maxim that you go to a busy person to get things done. The very fact that there are no plays with Elizabeth as authoress creates the suspicion there must be hidden plays of ...”

“... babble of Welsh and English. The mistake which Pope Pius V made in excommunicating and deposing Queen Elizabeth was one reason Pius XII was reluctant to take a firmer line against Adolf Hitler. Sir Philip Sidney’s state funeral was delayed until February 1587, perhaps to provide a ceremonial counterpoint to the ...”

“... for Marie Antoinette and a swathe of the European aristocracy what Winterhalter did for the young Queen Victoria and Cecil Beaton for the women of the House of Windsor. She invented them as one might invent characters in a novel, treading a delicate path between the swooning – very hard to treat Emma Hamilton any other ...”

“... final assault on tradition, on the Europe of Bismarck, of Napoleon III, on the Empire born of Queen Elizabeth I, on that Papacy of which Thomas Hobbes said that ‘it is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire sitting crowned on its own grave.’ In this splendid pre-war novel we meet Thomas Quayne, a ...”

“... studied to uphold.’ In 1848, John Mitchell Kemble, in one of the top three, assured (reassured?) Queen Victoria that ‘woman among the Teutons was near akin to divinity, but not one among them ever raved that the femme libre could be woman.’ On the other hand, some scholars (few of whom would make the top ...”

“... outlandish title, like the Most Serene Republic of San Marino. Its head of state is your very own Queen Elizabeth II (though she exercises authority on Jersey as the Duke of Normandy). The local currency is the Jersey pound, convertible on a one-to-one basis with its mainland namesake. In fact, there’s nothing much that ...”

“... play was written. Once Elizabeth I finally died, Shakespeare would be a subject of the son of Mary Queen of Scots, who, like Gertrude, had married the apparent murderer (Bothwell) of her first husband (Darnley); and therefore Hamlet, while unable to stop obsessing about what that son’s position might feel like, has somehow ...”

“... a year after a doomed international conspiracy to replace Elizabeth I with her papist cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, Donne was, as Katherine Rundell puts it in her new biography, ‘not just Catholic … but super-Catholic’, the scion of a double line of renowned religious recusants. His father’s family estates were ...”

“... and comic French, made the piece a tremendous success. The new King George VI went to see it with Queen Elizabeth shortly after their accession; and a few months later old Queen Mary – a true Aunt Edna type – came, too. That evening a slight hush ...”

“... and Prince Edmund was already dead, so Henry, now aged 45, had just one ten-year-old son left; the queen became pregnant, and hope revived, but a few months later, she died too, and the king, who had lost someone who was clearly much more to him than a political asset, was thrown into a state of grief and illness from which ...”

“... of the Charing Cross Road. Young, blonde and original, unclaimed by her Ottawa upbringing or her mother’s social hopes, Smart came to lean against those London bookshelves as if they alone contained all the answers. That day, she drew her finger over a line of volumes, took one down and read the poems where she stood, deciding by the last page that the ...”

“... made a home in my life,’ she wrote. ‘Never wanted to …’ But in 1923, when she was 27, her mother died, and she gave up her job and moved back to Inverness to look after her father. She went, no doubt, because she felt it was her duty, because she loved her father, and because her sister Jean had just started a new job; her youngest sister, Moire, was ...”

“... had been given to the city at the dissolution of the monasteries. A year later, on 3 March 1592, Queen Elizabeth issued a charter incorporating ‘the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity near Dublin’ as ‘the mother of a university’ with the aim of providing ...”