“... and later to Mauritius. The others he gifted to his brother Joseph, when Joseph became king of Naples in 1806. Renamed the Royal Africans and briefly commanded by Joseph Hugo, father of Victor, they fought Calabrian guerrillas before joining Napoleon’s campaigns in Germany and Russia. A strange and bitter journey, which took men from Africa to ...”

“... didn’t see the real Los Angeles until 1965. But to him the city was a myth as powerful as King Arthur. ‘I rented a car at the airport and drove down the length of Sunset in time to see the sun sink into the Pacific … I spent my time driving aimlessly around the freeways. It was concrete over sand. The anguish of lost souls … The people had lost ...”

“... Prussia, plump with nostalgia, miss the continuities that link the reign of the last Hohenzollern king, William II, with those of his predecessors. The Kaiser’s court was certainly marked by byzantine intrigue and toadying, but it hardly stood ‘in stark opposition to all traditional Prussian virtues’. Frederick William IV’s court had a notorious ...”

“... for Change would not be implemented until the lessons of the war had been analysed. However, Tom King, then the Secretary of State for Defence, had already promised to give the outline to Parliament before it broke up for the summer recess, and we still live with the consequences. The ‘coalition of the willing’ that came together to achieve the removal ...”

“... only the Führer knew,’ ran the refrain, a variation on the idea of the ‘good king’, and Hitler consciously protected his own image by ducking hard or unpopular decisions. Security reports noted that people were still craving newsreel shots of him as wartime losses and privations mounted, until the mood shifted after the disaster of ...”

“... Factory: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank (Simon and Schuster, £12.99), David Plotz investigates the Repository for Germinal Choice that was founded in California in 1980 by Robert Graham, an ‘eccentric millionaire’, and closed in 1999. The only prize-winner to fess up to having donated was William Shockley, who invented the ...”

“... Academy and showed his work at the Kunstakademie in Dresden (where he became friends with Caspar David Friedrich), though his paintings are strangely devoid of the scientific observation that underpinned his anatomical studies.On completing two doctorates, in philosophy and medicine, and in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars, he took a position as an ...”

“... chronicle play, Edward II, with its explicit presentation of a sexual relationship between the king and his favourite, Piers Gaveston, and the rumours about Marlowe’s own sexuality put about by a renegade Catholic priest in the weeks leading up to Marlowe’s death in 1593. According to BL Harley MS.6848 ff.185-6 (known as the ‘Baines note’ and ...”

“... transition period. They were belatedly tabled at the summit convened by Bill Clinton at Camp David in July 2000, but Jerusalem was the issue that ultimately led to the failure of the summit and the breakdown of the Oslo peace process. Religious rivalries are notoriously difficult to resolve, and Jerusalem’s spiritual significance for the three great ...”

“... In March​ 1960, Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of West Germany, met his Israeli counterpart, David Ben-Gurion, in New York. Eight years earlier, Germany had agreed to pay millions of marks in reparations to Israel, but the two countries had yet to establish diplomatic relations. Adenauer’s language at their meeting was unambiguous: Israel, he said, is a ‘fortress of the West’ and ‘I can already now tell you that we will help you, we will not leave you alone ...”

“... in the Upper Calder Valley in the 18th century. The gang was led by the self-proclaimed ‘King’ David Hartley, a historical figure whom Myers portrays as a charismatic freedom fighter and Northern secessionist. His raggle-taggle band is made up of ‘poor men, proud men’ with nicknames like Young Frosty and Mad ...”

“... be the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel. He also asked for a face-to-face meeting with David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, in order to break the deadlock in the negotiations. Ben-Gurion refused to meet with Zaim. He insisted that the Syrians withdraw their forces from the patch of land they had captured in Palestine and sign an ...”

“... like Angleton in the room. When he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for example, who took over as chief of the Soviet Bloc Division in the CIA’s clandestine wing in 1971 – Angleton would schedule time for ‘the briefing’. He didn’t tell Blee what it was all about in twenty minutes: he walked him through ...”

“... dream of a Jewish state over the whole Land of Israel, including the West Bank, captured by King Abdullah of Jordan in 1948 and annexed to his kingdom two years later. But, while preserving his doctrinal purity, Begin proved adept at forming alliances with liberal, nationalist and ultra-nationalist groups as well as break-away groups from the Labour ...”

“... fables and fairy tales. His Pinocchio begins: Once upon a time there was . . . ‘A king!’ my little readers will say at once.   No, children, you’re wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood. In that sense Pinocchio has more in common with those postmodern children’s books in which nursery stories are upturned – The Stinky ...”