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“... so fully on Italian republican thought of the 16th century. That Locke (whose 1660 panegyric to Charles II as a new Augustus Hill may not know) drew on mid-century experience and Puritan and Leveller argument concerning original contract and natural freedom is probable. These key concepts already existed in 16th-century political thought, but their most ...”

“... of the war, by occupying the area before the Allies did. This own-goal-that-almost-was inspired Charles Cholmondeley, an eccentric RAF flight lieutenant seconded to MI5, to propose sending another corpse to Spain with papers that the Spanish would show to the Germans. Cholmondeley was secretary to the Twenty Committee, which ran double agents and whose ...”

“... be done by the rule of government.’ It took the rest of the 17th century – a civil war, the king’s execution, the implosion of the republic, the restoration of the monarchy and the parliamentary coup d’état we know as the Glorious Revolution – to establish that government enjoyed no such extra-legal power.In 1685 the Duke of York, who had been ...”

“... be able still to be crowned to Handel’s anthem ‘And Zadok the Priest ... anointed Solomon King’. But future Archbishops of Canterbury would presumably have to jostle for space in the ceremony with representatives of the country’s other faiths, with Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. And what of the Princess of Wales? Part of her continuing ...”

“... rest.’ It was not to be. Less than two years later, Dryden was addressing similar panegyrics to Charles II – Dryden attributed his switch to his being one of ‘the good [who had been] misled’; and Cromwell’s grandeur was by then generally deemed to have come from hell not heaven, his parts to have been equally imperfect, and so far from his ashes ...”

“... Chronicle’ as opposed to ‘merely local annals’, to quote the most influential of them, Charles Plummer, whose 1899 edition of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has still, significantly or ominously, not been replaced. Since the Chronicle is a Post-Modern work, even this brief account contains slurrings or inaccuracies, but one could press on by saying that ...”

“... proper history of the Whigs began only with the Exclusion Crisis of 1679, the attempt to exclude Charles II’s Roman Catholic heir presumptive, James, Duke of York, from the throne. In the political dramas of the 1680s the Russell dynasty produced two of the iconic figures of English Whig mythology: the Whig martyr William, Lord Russell, and one of the ...”

“... Jordanians, Egyptians and Syrians were engaged in what Morris calls ‘a multilateral landgrab’. King Abdullah of Jordan ended up with the West Bank, and King Farouk of Egypt kept the Gaza Strip. Both the West Bank and Gaza turned into dumping grounds for thousands of Palestinian refugees. The Israeli victory is no less ...”

“... it out. In 1662 Pepys, a Cambridge graduate, engaged Mr Cooper, the one-eyed mate of the Royall Charles, to teach him arithmetic (after a month of lessons together they fell to tinkering with model ships instead). There was a ready market for such instruction, which printers were keen to tap. The stationer Thomas Rooks reissued Hodder’s Arithmetick in ...”

“... wreaking havoc on reaching actual size, but he was less impressive and more sinister than that, a King Charles spaniel of vicious temperament, a cute Walt Disney rattlesnake, or a beautiful child vampire. He was hardly an angel in the 1890s, but he truly blossomed after Oscar’s death, when he converted to heterosexuality and the Catholic Church. Wilde ...”

“... Wealth could not shield Jeffreys when war broke out in 1642. A staunch royalist who referred to Charles I as ‘the kings majestie’ in her accounts, she had paid her Ship Money without complaint, and must have been shocked by the unravelling of the English state. She gave a cousin a shilling in 1640 ‘when he went to Scottland to the warres’, and ...”

“... of John the Fearless by his Armagnac/Orléans enemies, a killing in which the dauphin, the future Charles VII, was implicated. There would now be no possibility of French unity in the face of English conquest. The reigning monarch, Charles VI, had been intermittently absent from power since 1392 due to his affliction with ...”

“... exemption but not the process that had introduced it: crown consent (in Westminster it’s called king’s consent, not to be confused with royal assent, which is the formal approval of a legislative act). This vetting of the democratic process is intended to ensure that no new legislation affects the crown’s ‘prerogatives’ or its hereditary ...”

“... and on land at Crécy (1346, followed by the capture of Calais in 1347), at Poitiers (1356, where King John of France was taken prisoner, and which Sumption reconstructs superbly), and the Black Prince’s final ‘disastrous’ victory at Nájera in Spain (1367). The story also has its decisive turning points in politics and diplomacy, starting with the ...”

“... almost to destruction in 1936-37. The crisis had three phases, of which the actual abdication of King Edward VIII was only the most visible. The monarchy had already been placed under acute strain by Edward’s unkingly conduct in the few months since his father’s death – his feckless hedonism, his dangerous political naivety and his neglect of the more ...”