“... in strength throughout the 1300s. Already in the 1380s, a group of embroiderers petitioned the king as ‘les Brouderers de la Citye de Londres’. In 1495, perhaps in response to undercutting, the Broderers petitioned to the mayor and aldermen of London that no citizen embroiderer should employ a foreign craftsman, except if granted permission from the ...”

“... history. The ‘weasel Scot’ in Henry V is a nuisance not a nation, briefly distracting the king, like Henry VIII a century later, from his planned invasion of France. After the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne in 1603, Shakespeare’s outlook changed, but Hutson sees King Lear as turning away ...”

“... one raid, a near miss blew a bus off course; it went through the window of Sainsbury’s on the King’s Road. ‘I was going out to see if I could do anything,’ Grisewood reported. ‘When I got to the door, David called out: “Tell them they can’t bring any of the wounded in here. This dugout is full up.” And he went on reading aloud “The Hunting ...”

“... stood out even there. The other soldiers found him hilarious: they would whistle ‘God Save the King’ in the middle of the night for the pleasure of seeing him jump out of bed and stand to attention. He caught rheumatic fever from wearing damp fatigues, an illness which, according to Kenny, stunted his growth. Having been thrown out of the Royal ...”

“... only daughter, Charlotte, then some time after Charlotte’s death, the daughter of the French king Louis-Philippe. He was also a field marshal in the British army, with the title His Royal Highness. This made him acceptable to the Concert of Europe, and his occupancy of the Belgian throne was a success. King Otto of ...”

“... 15th and early 16th centuries, major European artists came to work in England. In these decades, King’s College chapel was completed, Holbein achieved his great portraits of the king, courtiers and gentry, and Torregiano was sculpting Henry VII for Westminster Abbey. But, though there were notable writers ...”

“... the great-granddaughter of Henry VII; her paternal grandmother was Henry VIII’s older sister, Margaret Tudor. While most of Europe thought of Elizabeth as a bastard – how could a daughter of Anne Boleyn be otherwise? – Mary was as legitimate as they come. Henry VIII had removed Elizabeth from the line of succession, and only an Act of Parliament had ...”

“... and widowhood. Yet she was merely a charming eccentric at bottom, one of those comic ladies, like Margaret Rutherford playing Miss Marple; Keith’s character, like that of Addison’s Sir Roger de Coverley, was there to inform us of the harmlessness and ineffectuality of a defunct class represented by this posthumously lively personality. Helen Mirren’s ...”

“... always been for women to answer. It has become clear that women’s novels can answer them, too. Margaret Atwood knows all about the harassing particularities of family life, and has written about them with a memorable edge of resentment. Her high standing is largely derived from the way in which she has pushed these acerbically intimate perceptions into the ...”

“... Surrey’s uncle Thomas discovered when he was imprisoned in 1536 after a rash engagement to Lady Margaret Douglas, who also had royal blood. Surrey was unimaginably grand, but was also not unjustly described by John Barlowe, Dean of Westbury as ‘the most foolish proud boy that is in England’. His actions often tread the dividing line between brattishness ...”

“... internalised version of the mother. We can’t be sure of the effect of the lost mother on the king penguin, but we can be in no doubt that it matters greatly to England’s royal family. In his essay ‘The Place of the Monarchy’, Winnicott helps us gain traction on the problem: ‘It is in the personal inner psychic reality that the thing is ...”

“... eccentric (and currently anonymous) 16th-century Virgin and Child with Saints Louis and Margaret, with its grotesque dragon at the bottom of the frame. A View of the Sky from a Prison Window, both in its modest dimensions – no larger than a sheet of A4 paper – and plain subject matter, might seem rather underwhelming by comparison. The subject ...”

“... women’s lives. Eustochia of Messina stretched her arms on a DIY rack she had constructed. St Margaret of Cortona bought herself a razor and was narrowly dissuaded from slicing through her nostrils and upper lip. St Angela of Foligno drank water contaminated by the putrefying flesh of a leper. And what St Francesca Romana did, I find I am not able to ...”

“... ambition and postponed satisfaction, duty and patriotism.’ It is on this aspect that Anthony King and Ivor Crewe concentrate in the Skidelsky collection. Margaret Roberts moved from her Anglo-Poujadist origins via Oxford, the lab and the bar to eventual leadership and Gaullist ambitions, more honoured in rhetoric than ...”

“... of the development of our country in time’ – ‘our country’ meaning something different for King Alfred and Queen Victoria, but ‘the state structure built round the English monarchy’ being the core of it. I am not sure that this is any harder a job to do now than it was for Clark and his authors, who, Roberts says, shared with their readers ‘a ...”