“... conversing on the subject of ‘murder will out’, and one of them tells a story about a woman of King’s Lynn who confessed to having killed her husband when she saw a play about a similar crime:Sitting to behold a tragedy …Acted by players travelling that way,Wherein a woman that had murtherd hersWas ever haunted with her husband’s ghost …She was so ...”

“... Duncan-Jones is more drawn to an earlier episode in Paris two months earlier. The proclivities of King Charles IX were gratified at a great feast marked by ‘an exceptionally vile pièce de resistance in which a bag full of live cats and a fox was suspended thirty feet up over a huge bonfire, until the flames pulled the screaming mass down’. To that ...”

“... its leaders asked Petty and Christopher Wren ‘to consider the philosophy of shipping’, and the king himself urged Petty to turn his mind to naval matters. The mix of science and statecraft was compelling: Petty got down to work straight away. He wrote to the king, saying that ‘there was no greater, no more stately ...”

“... ken the man weel: he’s one of my thirty pound knights’ – which hit too obviously at King James’s sale of honours. Punishment for this sort of thing was no joke. When the authors were arrested, ‘the report was that they should then have their ears cut, and noses.’ Confrontation was Jonson’s mode as a man and a writer. He was a ...”

“... Israel, he said, would be a last resort. Kissinger snubbed him. He also ignored those, including King Hussein of Jordan, who warned that an Arab offensive to recover the territories lost in 1967 might be imminent. And he dismissed the CIA’s predictions of an Arab oil embargo against the US in the event of war.Early on the morning of 6 October 1973, the ...”

“... Alexandria, Smyrna, Constantinople and Beirut. More Greeks lived under the sultan than under King Otto, and the Ottoman ports prospered. But eventually every important Levantine port would meet the fate of Chios. Smyrna too was destroyed by the Turks; Alexandria was abandoned; Beirut – the last Levantine city to ascend and plummet – destroyed ...”

“... commandos who had made Beirut their headquarters following their expulsion from Jordan by King Hussein after the Black September fighting of 1970. Miss Universe 1971 was a Lebanese Christian ingenue, Georgina Rizk, who brought some bikini glamour to progressive politics by marrying Ali Hassan Salameh, the PLO’s security chief. Throw in the spies and ...”

“... still, these infesters were charming the people Goncourt most looked up to. He particularly hated Charles Ephrussi, an art critic and collector – and a cousin of Edmund de Waal’s great-grandfather. Ephrussi had become the chosen companion of Princesse Mathilde, niece of Napoleon I and herself a collector, albeit of writers and artists. Goncourt biliously ...”

“... Turkish servant and his pet dog Loulou) were brought back in a triumphant military procession; the King ordered a medal to be coined, poems were written, and Potocki was the hero of the hour. As the result of three successive partitions, the last in 1795, Poland was more or less to disappear from the map. Accordingly, and not too surprisingly, Potocki took a ...”

“... largest number of people today know by heart? The best known Victorian poem is probably ‘Good King Wenceslas’ (by J.M. Neale), followed by ‘Once in royal David’s city’ (Mrs Alexander); ‘All things bright and beautiful’ (also Mrs Alexander) is less familiar than it used to be, but was once possibly the best known of all. The most famous ...”

“... the age from which we inherit it. Anyone who lived through the first civil war, the capture of Charles I, the anxious days of the Long Parliament, the rise to power of the New Model Army, the establishment of the purged Rump Parliament, the execution of Charles I, the dissolution of the Rump by Oliver Cromwell, the ...”

“... in which family alliances would be less important, and the Annual Register rejoiced that the young King had ‘united all sects and all parties’. For the time being, however, the old ways prevailed and Burke had to do the best he could. He agreed to act as paid assistant and adviser to William Gerard Hamilton, chief secretary of the Lord Lieutenant of ...”

“... limitation of Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy is its concentration on Florence. Charles Mack’s magnificently-illustrated volume comes as a welcome reminder of the importance of other parts of Tuscany, as well as a spectacular example of what could be done by a patron who was in a position, unlike the patricians of Florence, to display his ...”

“... them – and in the end reluctantly accepted the only offer going. Malta was an informal part of Charles V’s newly acquired kingdom of Sicily. The main island and its smaller neighbour, Gozo, had very little water. The rocky soil grew few crops. The scant fortifications were badly sited. The citadels, despite reinforcements, presented easy targets to ...”

“... on to Malta and then to England, where she arrived in June 1827 and was taken to Windsor. The king had her fed on a supposedly nourishing diet of milk, ordered a warm and commodious stable to be constructed for her comfort, and commissioned portraits of her from three painters. But she didn’t thrive. Her head began to droop and physicians were ...”