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“... her definite superior in intelligence: the only one of Henry’s six wives whose marriage to the king was regularly called her ‘reign’ by contemporaries. That she had a mind of her own and was not afraid to use it is the most plausible explanation of her eventual downfall in 1536. Eric Ives’s biography of Anne, published in 2004, revealed her as a ...”

“... until her death in 1861. Late in life, she charged more for one of her ‘lectures’ than Charles Dickens could command for his readings, and her doings would be reported in the same paragraph as news of Queen Victoria. Her fame was huge and preposterous. In an age before the moving image, she turned herself into a cartoonish celebrity: a woman acting ...”

“... with the best claim to embody the ‘Stuart’ qualities, for better or for worse, has to be King James VI and I. This is because he enjoyed a double dose of Stuart blood due to his mother’s marrying her step-first cousin, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley: thus, incidentally, introducing the Anglo-French spelling of the name to the Royal house (although Mary ...”

“... who survived the Flood by riding astride the Ark, is derived from a rabbinical story of Og, King of Bashan. He also suggests that Rabelais was sympathetic to the ‘Ancient Theology’, the idea of a special revelation to non-Christian sages like Orpheus, Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus. The medical and legal allusions are in even greater need of ...”

“... reversal in the fortunes of his species that he seems to overturn. For it was the wealth of Charles Howard, Seabiscuit’s owner, amassed by selling Buicks, that made possible his love affair with racing, and his particular and passionate love affair with the bandy-legged colt who became a national hero. ‘The day of the horse is past, and the people ...”

“... was a popular conceit in the 1640s. For royalists like Reresby, those who took up arms against the king were taking on God. Ann Fanshawe, the daughter of a royalist MP, who was 17 when she fled to Charles I’s wartime headquarters in Oxford, likened herself to a fish out of water. The conflict between ...”

“... The Protectorate was over, the Commonwealth had failed. Charles II entered London on 29 May 1660, his birthday, and began hanging judges and reopening theatres. Tongue firmly in cheek, a royal patent lamented that ‘many plays formerly acted do contain several profane, obscene and scurrilous passages’: the solution was to have women’s parts henceforth played by women, as ‘useful and instructive representations of human life ...”

“... and wash their hair in white spirit. The Duchess was keen for one of them to marry the Archduke Charles. Zita was ‘all the more attractive for just missing classical beauty’ – a description that might have come from Cecil Beaton’s transvestite spoof autobiography My Royal Past. ‘It would be idle to pretend that the young man’s position played no ...”

“... she was ready – almost unprompted – to repeat yet again the story of how she had hidden Prince Charles Edward Stuart in the summer of 1746, almost thirty years before, and smuggled him across the sea from Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides to Skye. That was her past. But Flora would soon need all that resourcefulness again. Ahead of her was a much longer and ...”

“... on the world as he saw it do not pass through the prism of style. Degas admired him as he admired Charles Keene, and one would guess for similar reasons. Menzel’s first big commission was a series of illustrations for a Life of Frederick the Great, and he had, like Keene, an illustrator’s hunger for references and a reporter’s quickness and accuracy. He ...”

“... centre of the place de la Bastille commemorates the martyrs of the July Revolution of 1830? The king had insisted on pushing through unpopular ordnances, dissolving the recently elected Chamber of Deputies, taking the vote away from the middle class and suspending press freedom. Up went the barricades. Charles X, like ...”

“... word ‘last’ in their titles, as with Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings, Charles Kingsley’s Hereward, the Last of the English and Hebe Weenolsen’s The Last Englishman. Henry Treece broke ranks by calling his Hereward novel Man with a Sword, but Julian Rathbone latterly re-established the pattern with his novel The Last English ...”

“... tells us in Collusion across the Jordan (1988), by tacit agreement with the Zionist leadership, King Abdullah of Jordan held onto the West Bank. Not only did the Arab armies fail to save Palestine’s Arabs; the invasion became a pretext for their removal and the excuse for Israel to bar their return. It was an article of faith in early Zionist state ...”

“... wasn’t just a symbol of empire but was actually built on the proceeds of slavery. In 1660, Charles II had incorporated the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa. Its charter gave the company possession of coastal West Africa from Cape Blanco, at the northern end of what is now Mauritania, to the Cape of Good Hope, ‘for a period of one ...”

“... In late​ 1555 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and head of the house of Habsburg, returned to the Low Countries, where he was born: there, he began the long, slow process by which he abdicated in favour of his son Philip and brother Ferdinand. It was abundantly clear why such a transfer of power was necessary. It was a cold winter and Charles, white-haired, with shrunken gums exposing blackened teeth, his joints so crippled by gout that he was unable to sign documents with his bandaged hands, was exhausted, infirm and, in his mid-fifties, prematurely aged ...”