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“... children at their accession, most of them still in the cradle. (Mary Queen of Scots and her son, James VI, were also to succeed to the Scottish throne as infants.) The Stewarts were plagued by their history of monarchs dying violently and dying young (James I and James III were murdered ...”

“... celebrate a civil partnership in the Palace of Westminster, and his latest book tells the story of James Pratt and John Smith, the last men to be executed for sodomy in Britain. Pratt was a servant and Smith a labourer; both were out of work when they were arrested, and only Pratt knew how to write. Pratt was 32 and Smith forty. Pratt was married with a ...”

“... just as there was to Shakespeare’s choice of a fable that must have resonated uncomfortably with James VI and I’s vision of a reunited island of ‘Great Britain’. By the same token Shakespeare’s more direct engagements with the classical world carried their own ideological freight – and enable a different understanding of the stubborn persistence of ...”

“... one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is part of an Englishman’s constitution.’ Henry Crawford’s comment in Mansfield Park is a reminder that ‘Shakespeare’ is more than an individual writer: ‘it’ is an institution, a body of texts whose study, from O-level to the highest reaches of academia, is a means of legitimating social ...”

“... between the myths and symbols of homosexuality and the thing itself. If Bray is right, then King James I had something in common with Meredith Davy. Davy was a Somerset labourer accused in 1630 of having unlawful sexual relations over a period of time (and especially after he had been drinking) with the apprentice who shared his bed. The evidence was ...”

“... an unreasonable question. Nixon had flirted with using nuclear weapons in conversations with Henry Kissinger during the North Vietnamese offensive of spring 1972. When Kissinger told him it ‘would just be too much’, Nixon was outraged: ‘I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes.’ Kissinger soon ...”

“... streets or travel on the highways. It was in the aftermath of the War of Austrian Succession that Henry Fielding, a Bow Street magistrate as well as a novelist and playwright, began forming the force that would come to be known by the unofficial title of the Bow Street Runners. Fielding the novelist was a tolerant chap who found small infringements of the law ...”

“... serendipity. Apart from anything else, it is deeply unfair that it should. In Seeing like a State, James Scott is definitely in storytelling mode, though he seems unaware of the narrative biases that result. (It makes me curious to know what he’s like when he travels by air, which as an anthropologist he must do quite often.) He has two kinds of story to ...”

“... against the victorious Democrat (and Mason) Andrew Jackson and the National Republicans’ Henry Clay (nominally ‘on the square’, though inactive), but the Anti-Masonic movement would play a central role in the formation of the Whig Party. Several Whig leaders emerged from the movement, including President Harrison, who ran in 1840 as the nominee ...”

“... by stagecoach). Many were perennially ‘briefless barristers’, as Austen’s lawyer nephew Henry put it, ‘haunted’ every day by the refrain of their desperate clerks: ‘I should be glad, sir, of some work.’Discussions of social mobility during this period have tended to focus on movement up the scale. For struggling younger sons from ...”

“... place in church because it put her next to someone with ‘a strong breath’. The chaplain to James I’s wife, Queen Anne, held that of ‘all the noisome scents, there is none so rammish and so intolerable as that which proceeds from man’s body … I will not speak of his filth issuing from his eares, his eyes, nostrils, mouth, navel, and the uncleane ...”

“... speaking, Arnold is not an allusive filmmaker. But it’s hard not to recall the scene from James Whale’s classic Frankenstein (1931) in which the monster pitches a rather similar blonde innocent into a lake and leaves her to drown. Keira survives, even though Mia, like the monster, can’t swim. The film’s moral undertow has on this occasion forced ...”

“... Levinson printed 350,000 copies of the pamphlet, helping to fire up public and elite opinion. James T. Shotwell, a historian at Columbia, more conventionally targeted only ‘aggressive war’, defined as force used after (and in spite of) mandatory arbitration and judgment from the Permanent Court of International Justice. This definition led to a ...”

“... whole Church. Towns, children, parishes and days of the year were named for them. Even as late as Henry V the Battle of Agincourt was remembered as St Crispin’s day, after an obscure patron of cobblers and tanners, and Oxford still has its Hilary Term. Commemorated on 14 January, Hilary of Poitiers was a distinguished theologian, but the Legend takes more ...”

“... property and offices down the family line. In 1527 the first William succeeded his half-brother James as bishop of Dunblane, having already acted as James’s coadjutor (assistant bishop): this William fathered a brood of children, necessarily illegitimate, though that would not have concerned him greatly, any more than ...”