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“... opening up whenever the records are sparse. No male narrator comes between Mai Zetterling or Florence King and their readers. Each tells her tale in her own way. Mai’s way is to spill it out higgledy-piggledy as though at a diagnostic session with a psychiatrist. She chooses, somewhat startlingly, to represent her early years in Sweden as an ...”

“... was not an act of God but an avoidable tragedy.These two submerged villages are central to Richard King’s oral history of Wales – or, really, of Welsh-language activism and Welsh nationalism – in the late 20th century. The injustices and catastrophes caused by the government in Westminster weren’t the only thing that stimulated Welsh activism during ...”

“... Patrons are patrons,’ a citizen of Florence wrote to the Grand Duke, Ferdinando de’Medici, in 1602: ‘the patron is accountable to no one.’ But what exactly was a patron in Florence or elsewhere in Renaissance Italy? Despite the existence of a large literature on art patronage, the question received few direct answers till the publication in 1981 of a book focused on England: Patronage in the Renaissance, edited by Guy Lytle and Stephen Orgel ...”

“... who led a mixed host of French, Gascon and English free soldiers into Castile to destool King Pedro the Cruel in favour of his bastard brother Henry, rose ultimately to be constable of France. A good many English captains made considerable names for themselves in France under Edward III and the Black Prince, and independently on their own ...”

“... Why Florence? What made this particular European city so important for the arts in the Renaissance? It’s a problem many historians have tried to solve. The latest is Professor Goldthwaite, an old Florentine hand who has moved from a study of the ways in which the Florentines made their money to a study of the ways in which they spent it ...”

“... It is above all the city’s Renaissance art and architecture that draws visitors to Florence. Those calming vistas were no less precious in the 15th century when they were erected against the disorder that plagued the real Florence: the violent, chaotic city that Lauro Martines has brought to life in April Blood, a history of the conspiracy that very nearly took the life of the young Lorenzo de’ Medici before he had a chance to become the ‘Magnifico’ of legend ...”

“... and put in a vase on the mantelpiece. They dumped them all in the Arno. The four-year reign in Florence of someone resembling an ayatollah could seem a surprise: this is a city that we are encouraged to think of as a fountainhead of modernity. To Lauro Martines, who has seen Renaissance Italy as a spring of democratic authenticity diverted by ...”

“... things – growing hairy legs, flying on carpets, turning back into men? The Enchantress of Florence presents a different version of the same problem. It aspires to be a modern-day Orlando Furioso and Arabian Nights rolled into one. It’s about imagination and belief, magic, tolerance, cultural fusions between East and West, the ...”

“... slowing when it reached the natural barrier of the Apennines. On the other side of the mountains, Florence braced itself. The officials of the Sanità, the city’s health board, wrote anxiously to their colleagues in Milan, Verona, Venice, in the hope that studying the patterns of contagion would help them protect their city. Reports came from Parma that its ...”

“... In 1237 Florence set up a mint and struck the silver florin. Until then the town had been using the denaro of the declining Holy Roman Empire, but the coin was now so debased that it had to be supplemented with more valuable coins from the then larger centres of Siena and Lucca. It was becoming more important to monetise all transactions, to be able to transform all wealth into money and redistribute or invest it as one liked ...”

“... seat nearest me, they’re a couple. I make a left at lights beside a railway track and I’m on Florence, approaching the neighbourhood worst affected by the riots almost a year ago. South Central is the only area of Los Angeles in which I’ve seen bare advertisement hoardings, their posters stripped or weathered away and not replaced. The only commercial ...”

“... in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550), Leonardo began the portrait after his return to Florence from Milan at the beginning of the 16th century, and worked at it, off and on, for four years: this has been translated for convenience to a date of ‘c.1503-07’. Proponents of this date point to Raphael’s sketch for his portrait of Maddalena ...”

“... was so well known in the Middle Ages that he was depicted on an object produced for a European king: the Catalan Atlas, attributed to the Jewish cartographer Abraham Cresques (1325-87) and commissioned for Charles V of France by his cousin Pedro IV of Aragon. Musa is shown seated on his throne, wearing a gold crown and carrying a sceptre topped with the ...”

“... at Cremona. In Pisa, a similar attempt to seize government offices was also forestalled. Only in Florence was there a success – of sorts. When Mussolini arrived on the scene, he found the local squads poised for a ferocious assault on the city prefecture. Nobody had informed them that General Diaz, supreme commander of the Italian Armed Forces and ...”

“... 20 July 1554 and married Mary Tudor five days later at Winchester Cathedral, where he was declared king ‘de jure uxoris’, though Parliament refused to let him be crowned, to his considerable annoyance. If Mary had borne him a son, there would have been a Habsburg dynasty in England. Unfortunately, her ghastly gynaecological difficulties, which may have ...”