“... unsettling directions. In both novels, for example, Margot’s sister, Clarissa, and her husband, Henry, get divorced. In Liars and Saints Henry goes off to Sacramento to be a state senator; in A Family Daughter he’s killed in a car crash. Having written the story of the Santerres one way, Meloy seems to have been unable ...”

“... Feddens: Gerald and Rachel, and their children, Toby and Catherine. He is about to start a PhD on Henry James’s style at UCL. Toby Fedden was a contemporary of Nick’s at university: they weren’t exactly friends, but Nick had a crush on him. Gerald is the newly elected Tory MP for Barwick, a town in Northamptonshire – Nick’s home-town, as it ...”

“... college in Rome which would do for England what the Germanicum was to do for Germany. Ever since Henry VIII’s break with Rome, the English pilgrim hostel in via Monser-rato had been a largely wasted resource. The hostel, however, embodied one of Pole’s favourite apologetic themes, the ardent loyalty of the English to the papacy from Saxon times ...”

“... in the hotel with the townspeople. Kelly’s downfall is his manuscript. The local schoolteacher, Thomas Curnow, offers to edit it for him, adding that he would need to take it home to do so. Kelly lets him go, and the last words of his account are ‘He waits. No time’ – this is one of at least four ways in which Curnow robs Kelly of his voice. He also ...”

“... Fred’s dazzling ‘Tilling’ comedies, and has, further, been said of the later writings of Henry James. But Benson couldn’t understand the latter, didn’t like them, and strongly disapproved of the treacherous cult of young acolytes like Hugh Walpole and Percy Lubbock who lit incense at the feet of the master. ‘Life’s nothing – unless heroic ...”

“... fought that same year in a blizzard on Palm Sunday, he took the throne from the weak, ineffectual Henry VI and was crowned King Edward IV.Usurpers were plentiful in the 15th century. Edward’s claim was by lineal descent from Edward III, and was a strong one if you ignored the deposition of Richard II in 1399. In the mid-1450s, Richard, Duke of ...”

“... African story he told were shown to be without empirical foundation. But none of this mattered. Henry Louis Gates got it right when he said in a 1998 interview that Roots is a ‘work of the imagination’. This may be the reason it captured the imagination of millions and why genealogical work began a new phase of expansion. New organisations were ...”

“... Company. On his mother Elizabeth’s side he was the great-great-grand-nephew of Sir Thomas More, whose preserved head Elizabeth was (falsely) rumoured to have inherited and kept as a relic. Two years after Donne’s birth, his great-uncle Thomas Heywood was discovered to be a priest, arrested, imprisoned and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... By the time Shakespeare and his apprentice John Fletcher co-wrote All Is True (printed as Henry VIII) in 1613, wistfulness for the previous reign was already growing, despite what the playwrights and others may have recalled about Tudor rule: agricultural depression, enclosure, the plague, the poor law and the Essex Rebellion. The play concludes with ...”

“... chamber’. The work as a whole is a study of how decisions were made and implemented under Henry VIII. In the process, of course, Dr Starkey sheds a flood of light on many of the key decisions that were made. While his supervisor, Sir Geoffrey Elton, has always looked for the administrative structure, he himself will always look for the organisation of ...”

“... model for later humanist-trained writers. His epic of the wars, Pharsalia (the translation by Thomas May, published in 1627, opens Norbrook’s story), proved both an inspiration and a source for those who questioned or challenged monarchical power. While his significance has been noted by earlier scholars, nobody has explored so fully the extent of ...”

“... one to whom England had violently objected before he had even set foot there. In 1553, Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s first-born daughter, had acceded to the throne following the death of Henry’s teenage son, Edward VI. As fervently Catholic as Edward had been Protestant, Mary was determined to restore papal supremacy in ...”

“... to the size of its fields and woods, and how they related to villages and towns. In English Hours, Henry James wrote about the ‘old usual rural things’ he came across as he bicycled close to the east coast. ‘Part of the charm of one’s exposure to them is that they ask one to rise to no heroics. What is the charm, after all, but just the abyss of the ...”

“... had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of approaching him. Biography now belongs to the margins of historical writing. The economic and sociological determinism of the 20th century has questioned the influence of great men, while its ...”