54 Quotes About English-history

[Alix, Princess of Wales] had been taught to think that her beauty was her greatest achievement, and at heart was a simple, straightforward person.

To Victoria's evident distaste, [Prime Minister William] Gladstone made no concessions to her femininity. He treated her just like a man, or else 'as a competent and intelligent head of state'.

Before the twentieth century, to be a widow was perhaps to be in the most potent of a woman's life stages. For the first time, a widow was answerable to no one. For the first time, she could own property. For all women other than the queen, a woman's worldly goods, and even her children, had up to that point been not hers but her father's or husband's.

It is but as yesterday," he claimed, "that darkness and solitude - cut off from the rest of mankind like the lepers of old - the dismal cell, the bed of straw, the iron chain, and the inhuman scourge, were the fearful lot of those who were best entitled to human pity and to human sympathy, as being the victims of the most dreadful of all mortal calamities.

We've been brought up to think of the Victorians as prudes, horrified by a glimpse of table leg, but that myth was constructed in the 1920s out of whole cloth, to give their rebellious children an excuse to point and say, "We invented sex!" The reality is stranger: the Victorians were licentious in the extreme behind closed doors, only denying everything in public in the pursuit of probity.

Francis stared down at the Duchess of York's letter. He swallowed, then read aloud in a husky voice, "It was showed by John Sponer that King Richard, late mercifully reigning upon us, was through great treason piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this City." As Margaret listened, the embittered grey eyes had softened, misted with sudden tears. "My brother may lie in an untended grave," she said, "but he does not lack for an epitaph.

But there stands the sword of my ancestor Sir Richard Vernon, slain at Shrewsbury, and sorely slandered by a sad fellow called Will Shakspeare, whose Lancastrian partialities, and a certain knack at embodying them, has turned history upside down, or rather inside out.

... the best of men do not consistently live on the highest plane of virtue, and most men live far below it.

Popular feeling does not manifest itself spontaneously in writing; it manifests itself in argument in alehouses and church porches, in parlours and studies, in the market place or hunting field.