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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on her times. She is a witness to George III’s derangement in 1788, sequestered with him and the Queen in the Palace at Kew. She attends the trial of Warren Hastings. She experiences the Napoleonic regime first-hand during an enforced stay in France between 1803 and 1812. In her teens and twenties, thanks to her father’s ...”

“... could command for his readings, and her doings would be reported in the same paragraph as news of Queen Victoria. Her fame was huge and preposterous. In an age before the moving image, she turned herself into a cartoonish celebrity: a woman acting as if she had the same sexual freedom as that afforded to men. Audiences ...”

“... Christened Emma after her mother, whose later influence upon her was slight, the 11th of Sir Charles Tennant’s 15 children – three were born after he had remarried at the age of 75 – was to become famous and indeed notorious as Margot. W.E. Gladstone, allegedly more captivated by the challenge of the rhyme than by the personality of the 25-year-old woman who visited him at Hawarden in 1889, composed four stanzas of decidedly un-Homeric verse, each revolving around her name: ‘Though young and though fair, who can hold such a cargo/Of all the good qualities going as Margot?’ George Curzon, a Soulmate nearer her own age, was moved that same year to proclaim that, however ‘wide you may wander and far go ...”