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“... Charles James Fox was early hailed as ‘the phenomenon of the age’: an Infant Phenomenon like his chief opponent and perfect foil, William Pitt, who, Fox’s mother is said to have predicted, would be ‘a thorn in Charles’s side as long as he lives’. David Hume, encountering Fox at 16 during one of his formative visits to Paris, was startled by his intellectual power and maturity and already foresaw him as ‘a very great acquisition to the publick’, if the lure of a life of cosmopolitan dissipation, already strong on him, did not distract him ...”

“... England was at peace in 1626, when it was at war with both France and Spain. The picture of Charles behaving with a gravity that spoiled the conversation at Henrietta Maria’s private supper parties, brings the couple alive. The proclamation enjoining men to keep their urine for a year for the making of saltpetre captures the impracticality which was ...”

“... a blizzard on Palm Sunday, he took the throne from the weak, ineffectual Henry VI and was crowned King Edward IV.Usurpers were plentiful in the 15th century. Edward’s claim was by lineal descent from Edward III, and was a strong one if you ignored the deposition of Richard II in 1399. In the mid-1450s, Richard, Duke of York, Edward’s father and ...”

“... he shaped the course of events. At the Restoration he had to counter the charge that the day the King was executed was chosen to conform to his prognostication. Through the key years of the Civil War he had forecast Parliamentary victory and royal defeat (he predicted victory at Naseby, the key battle of the war), and Royalists complained that his almanacs ...”

“... Agincourt, to conquer Normandy and to win the crown of France. It was a providential escape for a king K.B. McFarlane called ‘the greatest man that ever ruled England’, but as Malcolm Vale points out in the preface to his new book, it may have been formative in other ways: for all his military success, Henry would fight only one more battle, and there was ...”

“... insecurity about the actual history and character of the US. The Olympic acquisition inspired Charles Rutheiser’s brilliant account of the city. An anthropologist teaching in Atlanta, he writes in the tradition of urban studies established by Mike Davis’s pathbreaking City of Quartz. But there is more ethnographic texture in Davis’s Los ...”

“... 1352, which is still on the statute book, treason consists of ‘Compassing the Death of the King, Queen, or their eldest Son; violating the Queen, or the King’s eldest Daughter unmarried, or his eldest Son’s Wife; levying War; adhering to the King’s Enemies; killing the ...”

“... At the age​ of 23 Prince Charles embarked with no great enthusiasm on a six-week training course at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. The course had been reduced from the usual three months for him, but it was long enough for Charles to realise that seafaring was yet another area in which he and his father had nothing in common ...”

“... Duncan-Jones is more drawn to an earlier episode in Paris two months earlier. The proclivities of King Charles IX were gratified at a great feast marked by ‘an exceptionally vile pièce de resistance in which a bag full of live cats and a fox was suspended thirty feet up over a huge bonfire, until the flames pulled the screaming mass down’. To that ...”

“... its leaders asked Petty and Christopher Wren ‘to consider the philosophy of shipping’, and the king himself urged Petty to turn his mind to naval matters. The mix of science and statecraft was compelling: Petty got down to work straight away. He wrote to the king, saying that ‘there was no greater, no more stately ...”

“... conversing on the subject of ‘murder will out’, and one of them tells a story about a woman of King’s Lynn who confessed to having killed her husband when she saw a play about a similar crime:Sitting to behold a tragedy …Acted by players travelling that way,Wherein a woman that had murtherd hersWas ever haunted with her husband’s ghost …She was so ...”

“... still, these infesters were charming the people Goncourt most looked up to. He particularly hated Charles Ephrussi, an art critic and collector – and a cousin of Edmund de Waal’s great-grandfather. Ephrussi had become the chosen companion of Princesse Mathilde, niece of Napoleon I and herself a collector, albeit of writers and artists. Goncourt biliously ...”

“... Turkish servant and his pet dog Loulou) were brought back in a triumphant military procession; the King ordered a medal to be coined, poems were written, and Potocki was the hero of the hour. As the result of three successive partitions, the last in 1795, Poland was more or less to disappear from the map. Accordingly, and not too surprisingly, Potocki took a ...”

“... largest number of people today know by heart? The best known Victorian poem is probably ‘Good King Wenceslas’ (by J.M. Neale), followed by ‘Once in royal David’s city’ (Mrs Alexander); ‘All things bright and beautiful’ (also Mrs Alexander) is less familiar than it used to be, but was once possibly the best known of all. The most famous ...”

“... the age from which we inherit it. Anyone who lived through the first civil war, the capture of Charles I, the anxious days of the Long Parliament, the rise to power of the New Model Army, the establishment of the purged Rump Parliament, the execution of Charles I, the dissolution of the Rump by Oliver Cromwell, the ...”