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“... the 1560s to the present time. I had not fully appreciated, for example, the extent to which Queen Elizabeth, both personally and through her ministers, agents and ambassadors, manipulated and controlled the affairs of Scotland ... In 1603, when James VI became James I of England, Scotland lost her resident monarch. Little more than a century later, ‘a ...”

“... history. The ‘weasel Scot’ in Henry V is a nuisance not a nation, briefly distracting the king, like Henry VIII a century later, from his planned invasion of France. After the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne in 1603, Shakespeare’s outlook changed, but Hutson sees King Lear as turning away ...”

“... The best place​ to begin Elizabeth Allen’s study of sanctuary seeking in medieval England is the coda: ‘Sanctuary in Southwest Georgia, 1962’. Here Allen vividly recounts an incident from the American civil rights movement in which her father, Ralph Allen, played an important role. He was one of two white college students who joined 38 Black activists in a voting rights campaign ...”

“... For sure circa Regna tonat. This comes as close as it was possible to get to criticism of a king who interpreted criticism as treason and who medicated treason with murder. ‘Wyt,’ the poem mourns, ‘helpythe not’ in demonstrating innocence. It is a punning lament, for neither wit nor Wyatt himself can change the mind of Henry VIII. ‘My head ...”

“... from her alliance with Great Britain: but unofficially they were spies for what is known as the‘King’s Secret’, a separate system of foreign relations, quite unknown to the Foreign Ministry and pursuing different aims. With the coming of war, it became one of d’Eon’s duties, as agent for the King’s Secret, to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a dirty pale man who has wild eyes and sings for a band called Boomtown Rats is crowned the king of Ethiopia. He is everywhere. Every news broadcast, every song in the whole world. Bob Geldof. Wherever he is people fall, twist, writhe, lose language skills, accumulate insects around their eyes, and then die on BBC. The anger here is counterbalanced by ...”

“... fragments survive, is a lyric version of the story of the tenth labour imposed on Herakles by the King of the Argives. Ancient Greek legend has it that Geryon was a winged red monster with three heads who tended a herd of magical cattle, helped by an equally monstrous two-headed guard dog. Stesichoros repeats the story of how Herakles stole Geryon’s herd ...”

“... from Cincinnati), Edward Payson Willis (a literary black sheep) and, most scandalously of all, King Ludwig of Bavaria, whose long entanglement with Lola brought disgrace, in the opinion of many, on the city of Munich. ‘What a hold this miserable witch has obtained over this old, adulterous idiot sovereign,’ said Sir Jasper Nicolls, a military ...”

“... and turns against the architect of the match, Thomas Cromwell, who is beheaded on the very day his king marries Katherine Howard, niece of Cromwell’s arch-enemy the reactionary Duke of Norfolk (who in Mantel’s version resembles an ungenial version of Sir Ector in T.H. White’s Sword in the Stone). As Thomas Boleyn, Anne’s father, puts it in The Mirror ...”

“... But Margaret Pole, one of the great magnates of Tudor England, is not overlooked. In The King’s Curse (2014) she was ground up by the great fictionalising machine that is Philippa Gregory, and in 2003 she was the subject of a major biography by Hazel Pierce: Margaret Pole: Loyalty, Lineage and Leadership. Pierce’s book is thorough and ...”

“... systems, sending a tremor through individual lives, wrecking certainties, reorganising identities. Elizabeth Marsh was one of those shaken by the times she lived through, her personal ‘ordeal’ intimately connected with global forces beyond the grasp of any individual then living. Conceived in Port Royal, born in Portsmouth, she ‘travelled further and ...”

“... events were the Reformation, when it lost its monks and lands and found its finances insecure, and Elizabeth I’s subsequent decision to make it a Royal Peculiar. This put it outside the jurisdiction of the Church of England, answerable only to the monarch, and left its dean and chapter in charge of its affairs. Since then, royals have turned up for ...”

“... to be set alongside Henry’s own authority, and the initiatives he instigated. To dismiss the king as ‘a narcissist who saw exercising control as his birthright’ is to ignore the workings of his shrewd and ambitious mind. The king was no idiot, and he rarely ceded control to others. Guy and Fox suggest that Anne was ...”

“... to furniture fittings, plasterwork and murals. These arts flourished under both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, as wealthy householders sought to surround themselves with beautiful and edifying objects to guide charitable behaviour. Unlike paintings on panel, such decoration wasn’t intended for prolonged contemplation: that, after all, would encourage ...”