Sublime

She herself later said: ‘It’s been a huge advantage during my professional career that I’ve always looked like a cheerful, fat missionary. It wouldn’t be any use if you went around looking sinister, would it?’ Any student who visited her sunlit office was entirely unaware that she stored a small, bejewelled revolver in her safe.

In April 1534, every man in the country had been required to swear the Oath of Succession, in which they promised ‘to be true to Queen Anne [Boleyn], and to believe and take her for the lawful wife of the King and rightful Queen of England, and utterly to think the Lady Mary daughter to the King by Queen Katherine, but as a bastard, and thus to do

The sixteenth century is also one of the first periods from which we have an overwhelming amount of surviving material. Our documentary sources are vast: chronicles, letters, ambassadorial accounts, poems, plays, treatises and state papers fill our National Archives. We have portraits of the Tudor monarchs painted from life, unlike those that came

the fate of Nonsuch: what was allegedly one of the greatest palaces in all of Europe was given by a disinterested king to a negligent mistress (Charles II to Barbara Villiers), who set about dismantling it to pay off her gambling debts.

when she was employed recently on the BBC production of Wolf Hall to be the hand double and weave some finger-loop braid,

Alexander the Great: ‘I am dying with the help of too many physicians.’