Ferdinand Mount

There’s​ no ‘s’ at the end of ‘rule’, and there’s a comma before it. As every schoolboy pedant knows, it’s ‘Britannia, rule the waves!’ – an imperative or exhortation, not a statement of fact. An ocean-going navy is not a workaday public service, like a coastguard or a constabulary. It is a grand project, an ambition, a national...

The sun​ still sparkles on the sapphire sea at Mamallapuram. The shoppers and sightseers still dawdle along the harbour front, gawping at the astonishing sculptures carved on the rocks behind: the gods and goddesses, bare-breasted and smiling; the lions, water buffalo, cobras and, of course, elephants. Nothing much has changed since the seventh-century poet Dandin, the greatest Sanskrit...

Carefree:​ that must be the essence of the sporting idea, whether you are doing it with Amaryllis in the shade, or on the village green with your grandchild Wilhelmine. You are disported, carried off out of yourself. In botany, a ‘sport’ is the wayward offshoot of an otherwise predictable shrub. The definition of ‘a real sport’ is a girl like Catherine Morland, the...

The first thing​ people noticed about Henry, perhaps the only thing they noticed, was his droopy left eyelid. He was blond, of medium height for the times and pleasant looking, but otherwise unremarkable. Nobody ever claimed that he was clever. Later on, exasperated chroniclers denounced him as ‘simple-minded’, ‘senseless’ and ‘useless’ – simplex,...

The Bank of England​ had been in existence for only a few months when it was first called on to save the nation’s bacon. The second siege of Namur in the summer of 1695 was to prove the decisive engagement in the Nine Years’ War. It was a huge battle, more than 100,000 on each side. William of Orange was in personal command of the allied forces and was making headway against the...