“... her time in the Netherlands, Anne moved to the French court to wait on Queen Claude, wife of Francis I. Claude surrounded herself with an educated, cultured community of women. She owned pictures by Raphael and Sebastiano del Piombo, and encouraged her husband’s patronage of Leonardo da Vinci. Claude’s security came from the seven children she ...”

“... Anthony Weldon, who is assumed to be the grumpy courtier author of The Court and Character of King James (1650), thanked God the Stuart family had been ruined. His assessment of James as ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’ has stuck, as has his unflattering physical description: ‘his tongue too large for his mouth, which ever made him speak full in the ...”

“... slender subject’. The case concerned whether a Scottish child could inherit property in London. King James VI of Scotland had acceded to the English throne five years earlier, and this was the first test to establish whether a Scottish subject, in this case the young Robert Calvin, had the same rights in England as James’s English subjects. The judges ...”

“... more admired by his people than the Prince of Wales, and now Caroline was a success with both the king and the newspapers. Her husband could not bear it. When she addressed the crowd from a window he came and closed it, explaining that she was tired. He removed the furniture from her dining-room so that she could not entertain. The rest of the court, ably led ...”

“... 2012 at the headquarters of the Order of St Augustine in Rome. Among the speakers was Karen King, the first woman to hold the Hollis Professorship of Divinity, Harvard’s oldest endowed chair. King had made her name as an interpreter and champion of early Christian texts that asserted the spiritual authority of women ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... swooned over Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember, and sung and danced with Yul Brynner in The King and I. This is a way of saying she wasn’t the twenty-year-old girl of ‘The Turn of the Screw’, had not lived what James called ‘a small, smothered life’, and was most unlikely not to have seen herself full-length in a mirror before she got to the ...”

“... with. Charles Estienne, a significant French critic, became her champion, and Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia thought highly of her giant abstracts at the Musée d’Art Moderne. She painted My Hell in her studio on the third floor of the Iraqi ambassador’s residence: the canvas was tacked to the wall, floor to ceiling, travelling around the corner of ...”

“... about the best state of a commonwealth in one of his epigrams (it goes roughly: ‘do we want a king or a Senate? – hang on, if we have the power to answer this question then we must already be kings; and if we are not kings we’d better shut up and stay out of polities’). In another he writes movingly to his children while absent from them on royal ...”

“... We Should Note,’ Francis Bacon enjoined in his Novum Organum, ‘the force, effect, and consequence’ of three inventions which were unknown to the ancients, ‘namely, printing, gunpowder and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world.’ Since Bacon’s time almost everyone has agreed that the social and cultural impact of printing must have been huge ...”

“... stronger than his occasional grudging acceptance of a community of interest. With Anne came the King’s doctor William Butts, ‘whose unobtrusive services to the evangelical cause played a key part in the course of Henrician reformation’. This Boleyn-Butts axis often appears in this book competing vigorously for limelight with Thomas Cromwell. We should ...”

“... England which had prompted James to take full control of his kingdom’s affairs. The 23-year-old king backed the English pretender Perkin Warbeck in 1496, hoping for the chance of martial adventure in northern England. His rashness on campaign led the Spanish ambassador to say that James ‘loves war’ but was ‘not a good captain’. The new campaign was ...”

“... called themselves John and Thomas Smith. Their mission was to win the hand of the sister of the king of Spain, the Infanta María. The courtly duo were not well suited to a life in mufti. The only coins they carried were of a suspiciously large denomination. A ferryman to whom they gave a silver 20-shilling piece decided they must be noblemen who were going ...”

“... romantic of British heroes: ‘this quiet sedentary student has a mind similar to the body of Sir Francis Drake, ranging distant countries and bringing back their treasures for his own kind.’ It would be convenient to dismiss this nonsense as the outpourings of a pre-war hack, with an unabashed talent for hyperbole and a peculiar passion for The Golden ...”

“... guise, and so helps to reinforce it. They are end-of-history texts, fictional equivalents of Francis Fukuyama, which deny that reality could be transformed in the very act of proclaiming how it could be improved. The Island of Liberty (1848) shows an enlightened aristocrat carrying out an experiment in human equality on a South Sea island, a project ...”