William the Conqueror’s chaplain used to tell this story to those who doubted his master’s claim to the English crown.

The night before the Comte de Lavalette was to be executed, his wife Émilie came to visit him with a proposal that left him speechless.

Louis XIV picked up the reins of power in France vowing to to drive the national economy in the common interest, not his own.

When Saint-Mars arrived to take over as warden of the Bastille in 1698, staff at Paris’s most famous prison had eyes only for his prisoner.

Edmund Burke begged the clergy of England to give us all a break from the twenty-four-hour news cycle.

Edmund Burke urged Englishmen not to congratulate the French revolutionaries on their new-found liberty until they knew what they would do with it.