“... she enjoyed – if that’s the right word – the adulation of the crowds and an audience with James I. She was not, in fact, a princess, however much it suited the Virginia Company to pretend she was. Nor was her name Pocahontas, which means ‘playful girl’ and like so many other aspects of Indigenous culture had been misunderstood. Yet the name is a ...”

“... recipe for Coca-Cola. And she formed a corporate board ready to go to war with Quest and LabCorp: Henry Kissinger; Sam Nunn, who had served as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee; George Shultz, the former secretary of state, one of the begetters of the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war; William Perry, the former US secretary of defence; ...”

“... celebrations last year for another milestone of Stuart English prose composition, the King James Bible, and although I was surprised by the large amount of public interest shown in that commemoration, I doubt whether the Prayer Book will have such an impact. Many will regard it simply as a tribal occasion for a particular Christian denomination, and so ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and equal inclusion within imperial frameworks before rejecting them altogether. The Jamaican James Williams, a former slave, used imperial justice against the repressive ‘apprentice’ system that persisted after the abolition of slavery; the Indian liberal Dadabhai Naoroji criticised ‘un-British rule’ in the hope of realising the economic ...”

“... That bloody woman!’ James Hamilton-Paterson’s mother was not given to outbursts. Then in her eighties, she had worked in the National Health Service for most of her life. But when she came across the three teenage girls (they might have been her own granddaughters) sitting on cardboard and begging in Victoria Station, something gave way ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”