“... lodge, and, when they failed to recant, to be racked in the Tower.’ He searched his friend John Petit’s house for heretical literature and left him in prison, untried. He applauded the burning of a harmless leather seller called John Tewkesbury, noting: ‘There never was a wretch, I wene, better worthy.’ And he ...”

“... both his friends and his enemies feared, with good reason, that he intended to make himself king, a title hated by republican aristocrats with a nearly superstitious fervour. Augustus, however, disclaimed regal ambitions and presented his new regime as a restoration of the republic, even though all real military power, and pretty much all civil ...”

“... Mark Griffiths: his elaborately illustrated essay, ‘Face to Face with Shakespeare’, focused on John Gerard’s well-known Elizabethan manual of botany, The Herball or, General Historie of Plantes, and purported to demonstrate that one of the four seemingly allegoric figures on its ornamental title-page – a figure clad in a Roman costume and crowned with ...”

“... later, Cromwell became Lord Protector. Under the Instrument of Government, devised mostly by John Lambert, his mercurial but talented associate, he ruled until his death in September 1658, assisted by a Council of State, in theory chosen by Parliament but in practice chosen by Cromwell himself from among his friends and relations and army comrades. This ...”

“... and was among those executed after the rebellion. ‘The play,’ he averred, ‘was of King Harry the 4th, and of the killing of King Richard II.’ Third, on 18 February, one of the players, Augustine Phillips, in signed testimony given under oath, described the play as ‘the play of the deposing and killing of ...”

“... Guards in the Great War. He was shaken and humbled, as the British Empire was to be. When his son John, aged barely 17, was rejected by the Navy because of poor eyesight, he wanted to go off and enlist in the ranks, but his father used his friendship with Lord Roberts to get him a commission in the Irish Guards. He disappeared the following year in the Battle ...”

“... History of Reynard the Fox into colloquial modern English. The book opens with the lion, the king of the beasts, calling the animals to court to celebrate the feast of Pentecost. The first thing we learn about Reynard is that he doesn’t want to go. The second thing we learn is that he doesn’t want to go because he has pissed on the faces of the ...”

“... Young Things. Think of George VI, Elizabeth and the two young princesses, ‘we four’, as the King observed with characteristic precision, ‘the royal family.’ And think of Elizabeth and Philip, whose domestic felicity was proclaimed to the world in the BBC documentary which was inevitably entitled Royal Family. At first glance, it might seem ...”

“... Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that he and his wife had seen ‘a pretty good play’ at the king’s playhouse, with ‘many good things being in it – and a good scene of a town on fire’. The ‘town on fire’ – a pyrotechnical display involving the controlled detonation of low-grade gunpowder or squibs – must have had a particular force for an ...”

“... I first encountered King Solomon’s Mines in the children’s section of a public library in Harare. Most of the books smelled of water damage and many had been taken out so rarely that the last ‘return by’ stamp pre-dated Mugabe and decimalisation. I was working through shelves of books about horses and morality tales written by women who manifestly did not like children, and took King Solomon’s Mines because it’s set in ‘the Manica country’, a province a few hundred miles east of Harare ...”

“... god of writing appears to an early Pharaoh holding his new invention, the hieroglyphic script. The king tells the god to take it away, because it would ruin his subjects’ powers of memory and concentration, and fill them with the delusion that they knew things when they did not. The Pharaoh may have had a point, but Plato was not above being ...”

“... So we have to ask why the Bishops’ Wars broke out in 1639; why the Scots won them; why the King and his English critics failed to reach a pre-war settlement; why the King failed to dissolve or prorogue the Long Parliament; why Englishmen took sides in 1642; why negotiation failed in the same year; why the majesty of ...”

“... bread were put out for the poor. Some five thousand troops gathered, on horse and foot, as Sir John Strangways, a local royalist, proclaimed the end of eleven years of the republic. A contemporary source describes a procession of ‘maidens, at least a hundred in number’, dressed in white waistcoats and led by a woman beating a drum; ‘both ...”

“... Roger King and Neill Nugent assemble material by which they seek to persuade us that there is such a thing as the middle class, and that in the 1970s, by use of legal process, it staged a revolt. For example, entrepreneurs and high taxpayers fought under the banner of NAFF (later changed to the Freedom Association to avoid confusion with the National Front ...”

“... was stage-managed by Scott) – opposite the playbill for a production in 1823 of Shakespeare’s King John at the Theatre Royal, which boasted an ‘Attention to Costume never before equalled on the English Stage’. A playbill for a production of Shakespeare’s ‘King John’ in 1823. The century before ...”