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“... took his pulse in disbelief. Now, the monk’s mechanical likeness, commissioned by a pious king for an impetuous son, would offer similar testimony to the power of saintly bodies. The automaton resides today in the Smithsonian, reminding us of humanity’s long-standing desire to create life that survives death – an impulse once fulfilled through ...”

“... beheaded ‘for the horrid fanatic plot, contrived for the bringing in, as they then called him, Charles Stuart, and the restoring of monarchy.’ This remark functions mainly as an alibi for his loyalty to the post-Protectorate political structure, and is intended to shield him from the charge of being a closet republican, or a classical republican like ...”

“... before it hit the ground is a familiar one in the mythology of the pop idol. It is the gist of Charles Shaar Murray’s book about Jimi Hendrix, who enjoyed a great career as a virtuoso guitar player between 1966 and 1970, when he died in a London hospital after an overdose of sleeping pills. In a sparkling homage, far more readable than most books about ...”

“... prefers to see this fresco as referring primarily to a gift of exotic animals to Leo X by the King of Portugal, because she believes that the cycle as a whole commemorates not just Cosimo and Lorenzo, as had previously been supposed, but all the major members of the Medici family up to that time. Leo, however, was not given a giraffe, but an elephant ...”

“... Perplexes monarchs. According to Milton’s early biographer, the Irish republican John Toland, Charles II’s Licenser for the Press regarded these lines as subversive, and wanted to suppress the whole poem. Immediately after the passage in which he imagines God hatching the universe out of the abyss, Milton asks: what in me is dark Illumine, what is low ...”

“... rebels. Fid. Def. survives on the coinage, though threatened with pluralisation of faiths under Charles III. But Ind. Imp. vanished seventy years ago, a fading embarrassment even then, to be explained away as a typical piece of Disraeli’s showmanship. Historians have shied away from closer examination of Queen Victoria’s role as empress, but the subject ...”

“... in Paris: l’éducation continentale by Michael Sadler (Simon and Schuster, £10). On 14 April Charles wrote Sadler a letter, duly circulated a few weeks later by his publishers (I don’t think it’s a hoax). To make sense of it, it’s useful to know that Sadler’s book opens with a description of a large cheese: The first chapter certainly did not ...”

“... is further modified by Michael Mendle’s searching essay on the constitutional programme of Charles I’s Parliamentary opponents in 1641-2. In the emergency created by royal mismanagement, Mendle argues, MPs were concerned less to assert legislative rights than to seize executive power – though, aiming for ‘a very English absolutism’ they can ...”

“... Lords. His speech was a passionate defence of the Nottingham weavers – followers of the mythical King Ludd – who had been smashing the new mechanical stocking-frames; and for the rest of his life Byron went on arguing that ‘we must not allow mankind to be sacrificed to improvements in mechanism.’ But what might have happened if the enemies of mechanism ...”

“... for independence and unity with the rest of the Arab world, expressed in testimony to the American King-Crane Commission which was set up to discover their feelings on the future of former Ottoman lands, was ignored. Under Britain’s aegis, the Jewish community in Palestine began, despite occasional setbacks, to flourish. Gradually, the Zionists revived ...”

“... it by providing detailed evidence to the contrary. A year or so before he died, according to Charles Greville, George IV slept badly and used to ring his bell ‘forty times in the night’. He had a watch close by him, but he sent for his valet de chambre rather than look at it. ‘The same thing if he wants a glass of water; he won’t stretch out his ...”

“... school up the road – ever saw, and I appreciated it. Round a corner or two in Petty Cury was King Street, where there stood a rank of pubs. A rite of passage in those days was to inhale a pint of suds in each within the space of an hour – the ‘King Street run’ – without puking, or without puking until the ...”

“... 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 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 brought up in ...”

“... there is Laudianism, the new-fangled High Churchmanship which was awarded political ascendancy by Charles I. Then, opposed to it, there is the old-fashioned Calvinism of that doyen of Puritan scholars, the Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher. Although the first system was less dogmatic than the second, both of them closed their adherents’ minds. Between them ...”

“... featured in our histories. As Clarendon, the first and greatest historian of the time, wrote of Charles’s relations with London: ‘the city was looked upon by the crown as a “common stock” not easily to be exhausted and as a body not to be grieved by ordinary acts of injustice.’ The city’s later Royalism, Ashton tells us, should be attributed to ...”