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“... II, the royal favourite Gaveston plans delicious entertainments which ‘may draw the pliant king which way I please’. He will introduce musicians to the court, ‘wanton poets’, Italian masques by night, and ‘pleasing shows’. Edward, walking abroad, is to encounter pages dressed as ‘sylvan nymphs’, and Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s ...”

“... It were a delicate stratagem,’ muses King Lear at one point during his great mad scene:                             to shoe A troop of horse with felt: I’ll put’t in proof; And when I have stol’n upon these sons-in-law. Then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill! R.A. Foakes and Brian Vickers, both approaching retirement after reigning for nearly thirty years in the upper reaches of Shakespeare studies, aren’t feeling entirely charitable towards their heirs either, although on the evidence of their new reflections on the state of that divided kingdom, Foakes is rather less malicious than his Shakespearean avatar, and Vickers rather less stealthy ...”

“... see grants of liberties as an expression of royal weakness. The outpouring of royal charters under Richard I and John has traditionally been regarded as the equivalent of selling the ancestral silver for petty cash. Paradoxically, this reading derives from another aspect of belief in the feudal system. If a ruler’s power consists of rights deriving from the ...”

“... as the royal motto still declares. But it was the son of Philip’s brother Charles who became king of France, reigning as Philip VI. Who had the better claim? If you accepted the notion of primogeniture, then Edward did, but if you believed that claims couldn’t descend through the maternal line, then the rightful ...”

“... is holding a copy of that morning’s Los Angeles Times, which reports details of the Rodney King trial. Now for all I know, George is so devoted to South Central LA that he holds a weekly acting workshop in Lynwood, but if he’s anything like most of the Anglos in Los Angeles, he is happier contemplating the minutiae of its native movie business than ...”

“... a phrase, a little high culture, but it has eerie undertones if you think about it. The soon-to-be Richard III had a very particular discontent in mind, and he had extreme solutions for it. Right at the end of the movie, a group of children in a classroom rise in turn, each saying, ‘I am Malcolm X,’ and of course this is attractive in terms of the fairy ...”

“... progress of the Vikings from raiders to settlers to would-be conquerors: an attempted invasion by King Sweyn of Denmark three years later was abortive, and though Norwegians continued for many years to control the Scottish islands in the far North, their effect on the British mainland was negligible.But if you take a more romantic view, the First Viking Age ...”

“... hates them all and is anguished with boredom. Then he comes across a reproduction of a portrait of Richard III and likes what he sees. ‘Someone too conscientious. A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist … He had that incommunicable, that indescribable look that childhood suffering leaves behind it.’ It’s a lot of romance to read into a medieval ...”

“... Mars shall on his altar sit/Up to the ears in blood. I am on fire.’ And Harriet Walter’s king – legs splayed as if on a bar stool rather than a throne – conveyed an authority which the whole world knows is fraudulent because it was founded on a crime (he deposed, imprisoned and some would say caused the death of his cousin ...”

“... valley of the shadow of death; make a joyful noise; go from strength to strength . . . The 1611 King James Authorised Version of the Book of Psalms – and of course of the entire Bible – is so deep in the English language that we no longer know when we are repeating its phrases. Inextricable from the beliefs and practices of its faithful for four hundred ...”

“... On​ Christmas Day 1788, the king hid his bedclothes under the bed, put a pillowcase on his head and hugged the pillow, which he called Prince Octavius and said had just been born (Prince Octavius had died five years earlier at the age of four). When George realised what day it was and that he had been kept in his straitjacket and not allowed to go to church, he suddenly went under the sofa, saying that he would converse with his saviour there, and that no one was to interrupt them ...”

“... the visitor who delights in the first also thrills, secretly, to the second. In Blood in the City, Richard Burton takes his readers on a walking tour of Parisian sacrifice and slaughter. He moves from the Bastille to the place de la Concorde (where Louis XVI was executed), to the Hôtel de Ville (where successive generations of revolutionaries raised the flag ...”

“... forebears answered it by simply declaring some people to be ‘saints’. An early medieval king remembered as a saint was nearly always one who had either opted out of active kingship to lead a private life of exemplary piety while others did the dirty work, or one who had been killed in a Christian cause. An example of the first kind is Edward the ...”

“... sky; His be yon Juno of majestic size, With cow-like udders, and with ox-like eyes. As Kathryn King observes in the first full-length biography of Haywood for almost a hundred years, these lines are straight out of ‘the well-stocked cabinet of misogynistic satiric conventions’, and they needn’t depict anyone in particular. Edmund Curll, the literary ...”

“... crucial operation for appendicitis on which depended the life of the man who was about to become King of England, but Edward and Alexandra had long been patrons of the London Hospital and this up-and-coming doctor would have come to their notice without the Elephant Man. If he continued to build up a lucrative Wimpole Street practice, it was because he was a ...”