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“... History of Women. Alexander was a man of the Enlightenment who regarded politeness to women as a mark of civilisation. Savages and ‘musselmen’ might treat their women as sexual helots, but a gentleman was solicitous of his womenfolk. Whether women deserved such treatment was another matter. Modern European women were commendably good-hearted, always ...”

“... docile animals, still commonplace in our schools and churches, seems to have been invented by St Francis of Assisi, elaborating a mere hint in Luke. And of course it was Prince Albert who brought in the uncanonical Nordic Christmas tree. For the laity, and especially its juvenile members, the build-up of extra marvels is acceptable because, whatever some say ...”

“... bête noire of traditionalists, has existed since at least the 1840s, though as recently as 1979 Mark Strand was denied a Pulitzer Prize because his collection The Monument was made up of prose poems. These days it often appears, in anglophone poetry at least, as one option among many: free verse, formal verse, prose poetry, erasure poetry, whatever ...”

“... The readiness of almost all of Scotland’s great nobles to serve in the royal army in 1513 was a mark of James’s standing within his realm. James and Europe’s other monarchs ruled over increasingly defined states in a world dominated by the formation and breach of leagues and alliances. James’s decision in 1502 to seek peace with England, sealed by his ...”

“... Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon is the author of the works published in his name: not Sir Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, living on in secret after his apparent death in a brawl in 1593 (before most of Shakespeare’s works were written), or one of the more than 50 alternative candidates who have been proposed ...”

“... of cats. Shulman’s writing has drive and bite, though the parallels she draws can be wide of the mark. For instance, Henry VIII ‘was sincere in all his doings. If he were alive today, he’d be Canadian,’ which is a good joke about Canadians, but not a good joke about Henry. Henry Wyatt trained his son in chivalry and in eloquence, and introduced him ...”

“... untill his body be bloudye’. Obviously, physiognomy was then regarded with some scepticism. But Francis Bacon, the harbinger of modern science, was not among the doubters. He thought physiognomy had ‘a solide ground in nature’ so long as it was not ‘coupled with superstitious and fantasticall arts’ such as astrology and even sorcery, with which, as ...”

“... it’s OK for little boys to run round wearing Liverpool shirts or shouting ‘I’ll be Trevor Francis,’ this is strongly frowned upon for even slightly bigger boys. One remembers the games teacher in Kes who ran the whole football session so he could pretend he was Bobby Charlton. Everybody does this in their heads, just like Walter Mitty, but let it ...”

“... World War because it raised the hackles of Pan-Serbian nationalism. A welcome new biography of Francis Joseph by the French historian, Professor Jean-Paul Bled, comes as a useful and erudite reminder of all that, for the outcome of the annexation now has its painful parallel in the outcome of Europe’s hasty recognitions of breakaway fragments of what is ...”

“... of society’. Reviewing Southey’s oriental romance, Thalaba the Destroyer, late in 1802, Francis Jeffrey in the first number of the Edinburgh Review brings up the Cottle connection for the first time. Recalling Southey’s earlier political notoriety and Wordsworth’s Preface, he turns the latter by selective quotation into the democratic manifesto ...”

“... was that truth will always out; the political explanation was that a new leader wants to make his mark. Or you could look at it in banking terms: bring off-balance sheet items onto the balance sheet and expose the bad debt, then adjust the accounting rules to make up for the loss in goodwill. People saw significance in the fact that Hubei’s new party ...”

“... is here for tears, nothing to wail or knock the breast.’ Samson’s father, like Mark Antony, assumes that his audience could choose to mourn their dead hero either by weeping or not weeping, and that he can offer cogent reasons to move them one way or the other. In that sense, ‘a tear is an intellectual thing,’ as Blake puts it in ‘The ...”

“... across the European stage, trailing clouds of martial glory. But whereas Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France inherited the kingdoms they had been born in, Charles knew next to nothing about his new dominions. Arriving in Spain for the first time in 1517 to take up the crowns of Castile and Aragon, the teenage king was ignorant of the country, the ...”

“... major collections to have survived the Victorian bonfire. The series has just reached the halfway mark and will probably be completed around 2020. The Carlyle edition, like the concurrent (but bonfire-reduced) Pilgrim Edition of Dickens’s letters, was launched in the optimistic Sixties (the late John Butt was associated with both initiatives). As in ...”

“... first occasion we know about: it was the war that secured the colonists’ independence (1775-83). Mark Urban’s book is about the experiences of one British regiment – the Royal Welch Fusiliers – in that campaign. (Most of them weren’t Welsh, incidentally.) The second war scarcely anyone in Britain has heard of, and even Americans seem to be hazy about ...”