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“... instead of my feet. My brothers hadn’t the same advantage.’ He hated disorder. His father, Charles Lutyens, was a horse painter of decreasing reputation (Lutyens had no pictures in his house when he first married so as not to have to hang any of his father’s) who became eccentric (dunking roast potatoes in tea) and parsimonious (using newspapers as ...”

“... it. There was a lot of glitter, hand sanitiser, and a samovar of tea. The show would open at the King’s Theatre in less than a week, yet the atmosphere was all laughter and promise.I have a thing for pantomime. I’ll spare you my theory that the best of it is better than King Lear and The Cherry Orchard put ...”

“... by the picture – which, as Unton put it, ‘did draw more speech and affection’ from the king than all his ‘best arguments and eloquence’.Novel techniques helped to intensify the effect of the portrait miniature. Hilliard used powdered gold to create a background of flames behind a lovestruck young man – the flames would have seemed to flicker ...”

“... convinced that item # 322 in Moore’s Checklist is spurious: that is, A History of the Wars of Charles XII. Their declared grounds are twofold: first, its totally unprofessional manner (‘everything in it bespeaks the amateur writer’); and second, its lack of general ideas (‘so intellectually vacant a chronicle’). Both views are critically ...”

“... and also the later, cello-centred set which he was financially obliged to write for the cellist king of Prussia. But people who notice this usually forget that neither early nor late in his life did Mozart make any complaint about the labour it cost him to create masterpieces in the closely allied string-quintet form, with a second viola enriching ...”

“... orchestrated books. Many readers today will be shaky about the shifting historical background. King Carol, Madame Lupescu, the Iron Guard, Antonescu – who were they? It is necessary that something should be said about their roles and attitudes, but how can this be done without long, boring explanations? Well, it helps a great deal that the ...”

“... full French control over the colony. The French forces, commanded by Napoleon’s brother-in-law Charles Leclerc, had some initial success. They captured Louverture, and shipped him back to France, where he died in captivity in 1803. But an epidemic of yellow fever killed many of the Europeans (Leclerc died of it) and opened the way to a black victory. On 1 ...”

“... little ease’ for his disobedience to its commands. Witherley applied to the court of King’s Bench in London for a writ of habeas corpus so that they might investigate the reason for his detention. The court issued the writ, but nothing happened. So it sent a second writ addressed to the jailer, Hunnyngs, along with an attachment for contempt ...”

“... effortlessly since birth from one favourable literary atmosphere to another. His father had heard Charles Dickens read when he was six, had helped to found Granta and furiously defended the Liberal cause at the Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair and Cyril Connolly, who, we are told, stood at the door ...”

“... Puritans like Cartwright and Perkins (though Dr Kendall would not call him a Puritan), later King James I, all agreed on the essentials of theology. This orthodoxy was challenged by Laudians in the 1630s, by sectaries in the Forties and Fifties. By the end of the century, Calvinism was no longer the intellectual force it had been. It was not stressed by ...”

“... must have informed his thinking when he came to consider the authority, rights and duties of a king, but the commonplace book isn’t a record of a mind made up; it shows someone sifting information and weighing evidence.McDowell reads Milton’s early writings as a programme of poetic apprenticeship in which he tried out a wide range of genres: poems on ...”

“... deposition of Richard II, the ultimate de jure monarch of the old medieval order, removed the last king of Britain who ruled by undisputed hereditary right. Enough princely blood ran in Glyn Dŵr’s veins to lend a certain legitimacy to his title and to the revolt mounted in its name. At one time an apprentice at law at Westminster, he was, above all else, a ...”

“... the depleted printers ‘could gett no better’. Fascinated with Roman remains, Aubrey took Charles II to see Avebury in 1663 after discovering the stones while hunting with aristocratic friends; he commissioned drawings of the 12th-century Osney Abbey before it was demolished. Like all busy people, he worked all the time, and felt he wasn’t working ...”

“... and, thanks to him, we know quite a lot more about Evelyn, such as his conviction that the king was leading the country back to a Commonwealth or his description of Lady Denham, the Duke of York’s mistress, ‘bitchering’. For most of his married life, Evelyn lived at Sayes Court, Deptford, of which nothing at all remains. Apart from an idealised ...”

“... because his coronation date, 800, was so easy to remember); that Philip Augustus was a good king because he beat the Germans; that Catherine de Médicis was a bad woman because she killed so many Protestants; that Henri IV wanted every peasant to have a chicken in the pot on Sundays. The children learnt all this from their primary school ...”