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“... Only after Charles Dickens was dead did the people who thought they were closest to him realise how little they knew about him. His son Henry remembered once playing a memory game with him: My father, after many turns, had successfully gone through the long string of words, and finished up with his own contribution, ‘Warren’s Blacking, 30 Strand ...”

“... but none was pushier than the Habsburgs. The match between Philip and Mary was made by the Emperor Charles V, his father and her first cousin. Philip himself proved no slouch in this department. On Mary’s death, he immediately looked into the possibility of winning the hand of her half-sister, Elizabeth. Don John of Austria, Philip’s illegitimate ...”

“... why Englishmen took sides in 1642; why negotiation failed in the same year; why the majesty of Charles I became so diminished that men were ready to fight him. Once these seven effects have been identified, it ‘becomes possible to match cause to effect’ with ‘precision’. Though the world hears more about Russell’s social than about his ...”

“... of John the Fearless by his Armagnac/Orléans enemies, a killing in which the dauphin, the future Charles VII, was implicated. There would now be no possibility of French unity in the face of English conquest. The reigning monarch, Charles VI, had been intermittently absent from power since 1392 due to his affliction with ...”

“... mythology has been made, there remains a charisma which even the most perceptive biographer cannot hope quite to recreate. We can glimpse it in the tributes to Sidney by the great historian William Camden, who had studied with him at Christ Church, Oxford. Camden was no friend to international Protestantism. He despised Leicester. As a rule, he was ...”

“... given by a nobleman to a trusty follower or – conversely – purchased by a would-be follower in hope of patronage. Hamlet comments bitterly on the clamour for miniatures of the newly crowned Claudius: people are paying ‘a hundred ducats apiece for his picture in little’.Eighteenth-century connoisseurs, who generally had a low opinion of Elizabethan ...”

“... future. The military details will be familiar to many from school history lessons. Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, having overcome the doubts of some of his own commanders, marched south from Derby to confront the hastily mustered Hanoverian army under the direct command of George II. As in previous engagements, the numerical ...”

“... Dalrymple, a hard-hearted cynic with whom Duffy has more in common than one might at first hope or suspect). Duffy has been praised for skilfully representing a wide range of ‘other’ voices in her poetry, yet for some reason most of the people who speak in her poems talk exactly like Wayne. Faltering. Like. This. It’s presumably meant to suggest ...”

“... resolve is in prospect, the figure of Hitler is as difficult to exclude as the head of King Charles. The drawback in the analogy is that, from a Hitler, it is impossible to demand much less than his complete destruction or unconditional surrender. Still, other keywords such as ‘expansion’ and ‘poison gas’ do keep on creeping in. Partly as a ...”

“... the discovery of insulin went to John Macleod and Frederick Banting, whereas it was Banting and Charles Best who did the critical experiments, and James Collip who extracted the insulin; Macleod was the lab chief. Since even scientists themselves have difficulty in accurately assigning credit for discoveries, how can historians ...”

“... East Africa in 1911: excited for the kill, he galloped too near his prey, missed and was mauled. Charles, having lost an arm and won an MC in the First World War, was felled by an angry buffalo in Tanganyika in 1928. Grey’s remaining brother, Alexander, a vicar in Trinidad, died aged 44, probably from the after-effects of a childhood cricket ...”

“... over the ruins of a town, burying beneath the rubble newly minted coins that bear the image of Charles II. This least remembered of the outposts of the fledgling British Empire is nearing its end. For more than a decade it had been a thriving commercial port, in which Charles, who had acquired it in 1661 when he married ...”

“... on 125th Street and Lenox Avenue (home to many significant African American artists: Norman Lewis, Charles Alston and Selma Burke) and finally to the George Washington Carver School, where he was mentored by Charles White, whose paintings – among them, Black Pope (Sandwich Board Man) and ...”

“... Florentine church of San Pier Maggiore was bought by the National Gallery in 1857, the director, Charles Eastlake, didn’t really know what to do with it. The altarpiece, painted by Jacopo di Cione and his workshop in the early 1370s, is one of the biggest made in the 14th century and, even though it had been dismantled after the church was destroyed in the ...”

“... from New York, who asked him when the world would end, Einstein said: ‘Wait and see!’ Let’s hope we still have a while longer to wait. A small group of children, in defiance of their classmates and, presumably, their teacher, too, insisted that life on earth could survive the extinction of the sun. Who better to arbitrate than the world’s greatest ...”