“... of subjects. By ‘politics’ he means the politics of Shakespeare’s time: the struggles of power and principle he sees reflected in the plays Shakespeare wrote under Queen Elizabeth. The greater part of the book explores the plays about English history: the six King Henry plays and two King Richard plays, which ...”

“... a wretch, I wene, better worthy.’ And he was not, as it turned out, a man for quite all seasons. Henry VIII, whose faithful servant More professed to be and for the most part was, was a self-willed tyrant whose last resort against the papal refusal to sanction his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his marriage to Anne Boleyn was to dethrone the pope as ...”

“... that you were more than just a local ruler: an increase in diversity signalled an increase in power. More lands meant an increase in the number of potential fighting men for further conquests, and when war was a matter of glory, of allegiance to one’s immediate overlord, and of loot, the pain of betrayed patriotism that marks more recent disputes was ...”

“... seems to go with the job. The exchange between Owain Glyn Dŵr and Hotspur in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part One – Glyn Dŵr: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them? – strikes a deflationary note familiar enough from recent television interviews. It had a lot ...”

“... the regime, were destroyed. The French ambassador said she was ‘above eighty years old’ when Henry VIII had her beheaded, while the Imperial ambassador said she was ‘nearly ninety’. In fact she was 67. The chronology defeated observers, as if her life stretched back into a fabulous era when dragons roamed. Susan Higginbotham’s carefully written ...”

“... media. As we now know, much more was offered by way of American support than appeared at the time. Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy is a very different kind of book, a study of two hundred years of international politics and of attempts to manage it. In essence, this is a set of lectures on the history of international relations combined with a vindication of his ...”

“... we have is unfinished. Hytner drew in popular unrest of the sort shown in the Jack Cade scenes of Henry VI Part II and by the mob in Julius Caesar. To make Timon of Athens a play for today is to cut through a lot of differences between Jacobean and modern London. Again, this is defensible, given the extent to which the tragedy uses Lucian and Plutarch’s ...”

“... sense that had no constitutional legitimacy at the time, and implied an alarming concentration of power – there was nothing innocent about the joke. Walpole’s self-promotion was a standard target, but Fielding’s sly participle gave a new twist to the usual complaint, and suggests how unlike a ministering angel an exponent of prime ministering might ...”

“... of the development in American criticism during the last three decades, from The Comic Sense of Henry James (1960) and A World Elsewhere (1966), through a middle phase in The Performing Self (1971) and Norman Mailer (1972), on to the major study of Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1977), and culminating in The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections ...”

“... sketch, Cotman could conjure up the poignant synecdoche of mighty fragments imbued as much with power as with loss. ‘Crowland Abbey’ by John Sell Cotman (1804). The exhibition largely ignores the fact that the bare ruined choirs which caught the Romantic imagination were the remains of religious buildings, yet that was important to their ...”

“... a naval lieutenant in his forties, who died a few years later. That was her first unwise marriage. Henry Robinson, a Protestant from Northern Ireland, proposed twice before she accepted him – with ‘almost open’ eyes. By then her chances of finding a husband more to her liking were not good: she was 31, not pretty (we don’t know what she looked like but ...”

“... volunteered that he ‘hated the name Mabel more than any other female name’. Anne decided Henry was the name she found ‘unbearable’. For a long time afterwards, ‘in the most cosy and affectionate lover kind of talk … she was Mabel and I was Henry.’ Not long after that Berryman began to write his Dream ...”

“... Marshal, first Earl of Pembroke, who rose from relative obscurity to become regent for the young Henry III and one of the most powerful men in Europe. Marshal’s craftsmen used fast-grown trees for the door’s outer face and a powerful lattice of slow-grown timber for the reinforcement inside: no expense spared, no older wood reused, nothing but the best ...”

“... were Walter Brudno, Smith Brookhart, Nick Doman, Benjamin Ferencz, Whitney Harris, Charles Horsky, Henry King, Daniel Margolies and Walter Rockler, and they had all been prosecuting lawyers at the Nuremberg Trial and Subsequent Proceedings in 1945-9. Their audience was just as extraordinary: over a hundred men and women who had been ...”

“... not appear so at the time. Francis Galton, at least, was so struck by the report that he wrote to Henry Sidgwick (the philosopher and Eleanor’s husband, widely believed, ironically, to be impotent – at least they had no children) suggesting a scheme for getting more of these eugenically sound young women into the breeding stock: ‘I heartily wish it were ...”