“... clear that large, well-managed realms (like France) would always defeat small city-states (like Florence and Siena). Kings and their dynasties could legitimise the hold of these new, large-scale states over their subjects by giving them a human face (in the language of Hobbes, which came to be the language of the modern world, by ‘personating’ or ...”

“... his history of Birmingham back to the Middle Ages; the truth is that bar the founding in 1552 of King Edward’s School, which would become an influential elite institution, there’s little worth saying about the place until the 18th century. But there is a lack of deep continuity in the histories of many interesting places – consider ...”

“... age of 50.Glenn Gould was born in 1932 in Toronto, the only child of Bert Gould, a furrier, and Florence Greig (who liked to claim that Edvard Grieg was a distant relation). His musical education was neither high-powered nor high pressured: his mother taught him until he was ten, when he started lessons with Alberto Guerrero at the Toronto ...”

“... fl. four million BC, ‘archaeological hoax’). Then comes Leir or Lear (supp. fl. c.820 BC, ‘king of Britain’), followed by several other equally doubtful types whose inclusion prompts the thought that although subjects must be dead to merit inclusion, there is no equally stringent requirement about having lived in the first place; even some very dodgy ...”

“... idea of subtler minds. It is, he writes, clear-cut: Lightborn ‘pretends to seduce the faggot king, and then gives him what every faggot needs: a red-hot poker up the arse’. Any audience would have understood this. The first 126 Sonnets are, for the most part, filled with a desire which is artful and playful and almost light: Marlowe’s version of ...”

“... fearful of going down with him after the Allies landed in Sicily. After a brief interval, the king fled with Badoglio, the conqueror of Ethiopia, to the South, where the Allies put them atop an unaltered regional administration, while in the North the Germans set up Mussolini at the head of a puppet regime in Salò. When the war came to an end, Italy was ...”

“... tabulated. He noted the many terms for scrofula that were commonly used in Ireland: ‘The Evil, King’s Evil, The Running Evil, Running Sore, Felloon, Bone Evil, Glandular Disease, an Impostume; in Irish Easbaidh bragadh, deficiency in the neck; Fiolun, the treacherous disease; Cneadh Cnaithneach, the wasting ulcer; Cuit bragach, cuts in the ...”

“... not stop bitter enemies in the Party from becoming important regional figures, like Biedenkopf (‘King Kurt’) in Saxony. The SPD has never allowed the same personalisation of authority. When it has been in power, the pattern has always been a diarchy – Brandt and Herbert Wehner, or Schmidt and Brandt – with the Chancellor flanked by a powerful and ...”

“... from the tough, concerted effort to wrest freedom from the authority of a tyrannical Spanish king. Freedom and tolerance ignited the light of our Golden Age. These two enabled the miracle of a country inhabited by barely two million people that left every other European country far behind in entrepreneurial spirit, culture, science and ...”

“... named Abraham Stern, travelling to Italy to take up a scholarship in classics at the University of Florence, offered by Mussolini’s government. When they got talking, Isaiah asked him what Stern thought of the recent British move to create a legislative council in Palestine. We shall fight that, Stern said. Why? Because it would give the Arabs representation ...”