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“... congested time, perhaps the most controversial period of English history, between the breakdown of Charles I’s personal rule in 1640, when financial collapse and military defeat by the Scots drove the king to call the Parliament that would destroy him, and the year of the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 (though whereas ...”

“... as prototypes of the liberated woman. An idyllic image of Spartan liberation can be found in Charles Seltman’s Women in Antiquity (1956): ‘At no time in the world’s history can women have been so contented, so healthy and so happy as they were in ancient Sparta.’ He added that they lacked only two things: a vote and a wardrobe. In the ...”

“... to appoint his replacement? If it was parliament, could it also set conditions of tenure? When Charles II died in 1685 without legitimate offspring, the throne passed to his brother James, Duke of York, who had been brought up in exile in France as a Catholic and who now began publicly attending mass. Within a few months the Duke of Monmouth’s abortive ...”

“... He was a doomed man. In spite of his enormous youthful popularity, he was ill-fitted to be a King or President or Head of State of any kind. His inner confidence was early and fatally corroded by ceaseless bullying from his martinet father, George V, and by a lack of maternal love. Amateur psychology in biography is a prevalent and dangerous fashion ...”

“... Their names were Walter Brudno, Smith Brookhart, Nick Doman, Benjamin Ferencz, Whitney Harris, Charles Horsky, Henry King, Daniel Margolies and Walter Rockler, and they had all been prosecuting lawyers at the Nuremberg Trial and Subsequent Proceedings in 1945-9. Their audience was just as extraordinary: over a hundred ...”

“... borrowing from elsewhere, but the English monarchy has long liked to acquire pictures of artists. Charles I, a king much absorbed by how he was himself depicted, bought, commissioned or was given numerous artist portraits. The Commonwealth sold Charles’s collection, and although many of ...”

“... position was itself almost as hazardous as those of the characters in the poem, although King Charles, whose favourite poem was Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, loved nothing more than a pungent pro-Establishment satire, and Dryden was well aware that – colleges on bounteous kings depend, And never rebel was to arts a friend. The friend whose ...”

“... Confronted with kings called Charles the Bald, Charles the Simple, Charles the Fat and Louis the Blind, and chroniclers like Notker the Stammerer, Benzo of Alba and Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, we might be tempted to think that the history of France and Germany a millennium ago can offer us nothing more than the dreary spectacle of one barbarian succeeding another on the banks of the Seine or the Rhine ...”

“... it was Goya’s first significant royal portrait, a prelude to the painfully truthful Family of Charles IV. It is more rewarding to visit than most exhibitions, however many paintings they include.Of all portrait genres, the informal group is the most difficult. It depends, first of all, on something that any family snapshot shows is highly unlikely: that a ...”

“... legal state depriving women of much of their freedom along with their name. Writing in 1808, Charles Fourier argued that ‘high-class courtesans’ were among the only women in history who had enjoyed any real measure of liberty (along with shop-girls and Catherine the Great). But Fourier may have been fantasising when he said that they had their own ...”

“... The bulk of the book is set in the generation before it, from the years around the accession of Charles I to the outbreak of fighting in 1642. ‘Cavalier’ meant more things after 1642 than before it. It was in the mid-winter of 1641-42, in the crisis which turned on the king’s entry into the House of Commons in an ...”

“... Young Things. Think of George VI, Elizabeth and the two young princesses, ‘we four’, as the King observed with characteristic precision, ‘the royal family.’ And think of Elizabeth and Philip, whose domestic felicity was proclaimed to the world in the BBC documentary which was inevitably entitled Royal Family. At first glance, it might seem ...”

“... intact and housed in the heart of the building, its treasures on permanent display. Among these is Charles II’s copy of the Eikon Basilike. One can only wonder what the exiled prince thought as he read this tribute to his father’s martyrdom. Did it spur him to seek revenge? Is this what induced him to make a corrupt bargain with the Scots in 1650 and ...”

“... he was now moving directly to 1660, because everything that had happened between the trial of the king and the restoration of the monarchy was a nullity. By this simple and efficient process John Cooke, the barrister who prosecuted Charles I, has been airbrushed from history, save by a handful of historians of the trial who ...”

“... the most extraordinary incidents in 17th-century English history. On 17 February 1623, the future Charles I and the royal favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, set off for Madrid incognito. They wore false beards, and they called themselves John and Thomas Smith. Their mission was to win the hand of the sister of the king of ...”