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“... of a horse race.) According to the director’s own amused voiceover, a young seahorse resembles a King Charles spaniel. Fully grown, it’s a puffed-up and pompous individual, fretfully anthropoid, given to pouting and anxiously darting its eyes. Like the sea snail, this animal is ambiguously sexed: the female inserts her eggs in the male’s belly, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the war, by occupying the area before the Allies did. This own-goal-that-almost-was inspired Charles Cholmondeley, an eccentric RAF flight lieutenant seconded to MI5, to propose sending another corpse to Spain with papers that the Spanish would show to the Germans. Cholmondeley was secretary to the Twenty Committee, which ran double agents and whose ...”

“... so fully on Italian republican thought of the 16th century. That Locke (whose 1660 panegyric to Charles II as a new Augustus Hill may not know) drew on mid-century experience and Puritan and Leveller argument concerning original contract and natural freedom is probable. These key concepts already existed in 16th-century political thought, but their most ...”

“... said to his face: ‘It would be a good thing if you were taken and shut away, as was done to Charles the Simple. There are houses with iron bars at Windsor that would be good for imprisoning you securely.’Henry was also affectionate by nature and incurably weepy. He broke down in tears whenever he was saying goodbye to his (far ...”

“... be done by the rule of government.’ It took the rest of the 17th century – a civil war, the king’s execution, the implosion of the republic, the restoration of the monarchy and the parliamentary coup d’état we know as the Glorious Revolution – to establish that government enjoyed no such extra-legal power.In 1685 the Duke of York, who had been ...”

“... it had neither a standing army nor a permanent system of taxation to support one. Every time the king wanted to mount a military expedition, which was often, he had to persuade a resistant parliament to levy a new tax. Meanwhile, tremendous power was vested in the landed aristocracy. In a strange anomaly, the realm included three palatinates, territories to ...”

“... be able still to be crowned to Handel’s anthem ‘And Zadok the Priest ... anointed Solomon King’. But future Archbishops of Canterbury would presumably have to jostle for space in the ceremony with representatives of the country’s other faiths, with Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. And what of the Princess of Wales? Part of her continuing ...”

“... rest.’ It was not to be. Less than two years later, Dryden was addressing similar panegyrics to Charles II – Dryden attributed his switch to his being one of ‘the good [who had been] misled’; and Cromwell’s grandeur was by then generally deemed to have come from hell not heaven, his parts to have been equally imperfect, and so far from his ashes ...”

“... Chronicle’ as opposed to ‘merely local annals’, to quote the most influential of them, Charles Plummer, whose 1899 edition of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has still, significantly or ominously, not been replaced. Since the Chronicle is a Post-Modern work, even this brief account contains slurrings or inaccuracies, but one could press on by saying that ...”

“... proper history of the Whigs began only with the Exclusion Crisis of 1679, the attempt to exclude Charles II’s Roman Catholic heir presumptive, James, Duke of York, from the throne. In the political dramas of the 1680s the Russell dynasty produced two of the iconic figures of English Whig mythology: the Whig martyr William, Lord Russell, and one of the ...”

“... Jordanians, Egyptians and Syrians were engaged in what Morris calls ‘a multilateral landgrab’. King Abdullah of Jordan ended up with the West Bank, and King Farouk of Egypt kept the Gaza Strip. Both the West Bank and Gaza turned into dumping grounds for thousands of Palestinian refugees. The Israeli victory is no less ...”

“... wreaking havoc on reaching actual size, but he was less impressive and more sinister than that, a King Charles spaniel of vicious temperament, a cute Walt Disney rattlesnake, or a beautiful child vampire. He was hardly an angel in the 1890s, but he truly blossomed after Oscar’s death, when he converted to heterosexuality and the Catholic Church. Wilde ...”

“... Wealth could not shield Jeffreys when war broke out in 1642. A staunch royalist who referred to Charles I as ‘the kings majestie’ in her accounts, she had paid her Ship Money without complaint, and must have been shocked by the unravelling of the English state. She gave a cousin a shilling in 1640 ‘when he went to Scottland to the warres’, and ...”