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“... People began to look back to a different past, the one presided over by Gloriana rediviva; and the Queen’s own strenuous self-propaganda in the last years of her reign, unconvincing in her lifetime, became all too potent once she was dead. Ironically, the adulation was encouraged in part by James himself. Fulke ...”

“... else has been said about the first Elizabeth (one recalls Sheridan’s ‘no scandal about Queen Elizabeth I hope?’) no one has ever complimented her on being dull. In sending her royal brother Edward VI her youthful likeness, soon to be hidden for ever behind the iconic mask of royalty, she apologised for her ...”

“... Beaton took of the royal family for the next 30 years. At first, froth dominates. Here is the queenmother, from that first session in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, tricked out in lacy Edwardiana that practically glows. Beaton often pictured her literally radiant: photographed ...”

“... trees, with Landseer and Winterhalter conveniently to hand to paint them. Think of George V and Queen Mary, an inseparable couple, who did so much to uphold decent family values in the rackety era of the Bright Young Things. Think of George VI, Elizabeth and the two young princesses, ‘we four’, as the King observed ...”

“... The present queen​ was not the only person to feel, when her grandmother Queen Mary died in 1953, that she ‘could not imagine a world without her’. The ‘old queen’, as she was generally known to the public, had become a totemic figure, rigidly upright in her toque and pearls, a grandmother to the nation ...”

“... indeed fanatical. The truth is that Elizabeth probably owed more than we generally realise to her mother. The portraits are strikingly similar, except for the colour of the hair: but as Anne Boleyn died young, and in popular disgrace, it is difficult to estimate how she might have turned out. Nevertheless, a comparison between Mary and Elizabeth, daughters of ...”

“... reverses in English history, the culmination of long-term plotting spearheaded by his formidable mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, the most successful politician in 15th-century England. Her role, largely forgotten for centuries and thrillingly rediscovered by Michael Jones and Malcolm Underwood in The King’s ...”

“... The Queen once detained me as I tried to get into an ice-rink. It was one of those hot days in the summer of 1977, and the portly Mr Waddle, or Akela as we liked to call him in Jungle Book parlance, took a pack of us to the Magnum Leisure Centre. I was feeling a bit down as I only had one cub scout badge (for housekeeping) and I thought I might get another one pinned to my jumper for careering across the ice in my toggle and cap ...”

“... we are on the far side of that watershed which Eliot called the dissociation of sensibility. As queen, it would be the merest commonplace to identify Anne with the Virgin Mary or, alternatively, with her mother, St Anne. Yes, another country. Yet there were many aspects of the ...”

“... to invade. What was more, he had been a new kind of king, the consort of England’s first ruling queen, and one to whom England had violently objected before he had even set foot there. In 1553, Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s first-born daughter, had acceded to the throne following the death of Henry’s teenage son, Edward ...”

“... furtive manner for a baby of his exalted rank’. In 1790 his father, the fifth Duke, and his mother, the giddy Duchess Georgiana, had been travelling in the Low Countries, where the Austrian threat became such that they bolted for the safety of Revolutionary Paris. The party included the Duke’s mistress, Lady Elizabeth Foster, and his four young ...”

“... Protestant writers – William Camden was one – praised his unswerving allegiance to the queen, his tireless dedication to the reformed religion, and his genius as ‘a most subtil searcher of hidden secrets’. Confessional sentiment has continued to colour accounts of Walsingham in the centuries since. He remains ...”

“... Catherine of Aragon was Henry VIII’s first and longest-lasting queen, at the heart of his glittering court for almost two decades. In the early years of their marriage, the Spanish princess, daughter of the most glamorous monarchs in Europe, must have seemed every bit as regal as her husband ...”

“... the state. Although there had been signs and portents of these developments during the reigns of Queen Anne and the early Hanoverians, the British monarchy first seriously embraced good works during the time of George III, who in this as much else was the father and founder of modern royalty. He allowed his name to be ...”

“... reputation through five phases of her career: as heiress, crusader, patroness of poets, queenmother and aged affiliate of Fontevraud, the nunnery where she is buried. Eleanor’s contemporaries, like modern historians, were agreed that she both sought and exercised power. But ...”