“... in June, Pavese won the Strega prize, Italy’s most important literary award. ‘So, I’m king of my trade,’ he writes. ‘In ten years I’ve done it all.’ The failure in love reinforced his conviction that life would always elude him; the literary success made him intensely aware of the trivialisation of literature. ‘These days we see the ...”

“... they made one. Street fighting broke out. Soon it spread to Naples, forcing Ferdinand, the Bourbon king of the Two Sicilies, to grant a constitution. All Italy seethed. But did the news from Palermo somehow touch off the explosion in Paris that February? Clark doesn’t do domino theories. Instead, he writes of ‘a plurality of cumulative instabilities ...”

“... which you see but can’t look at – When he came in everyone (women too) got up as if he were a King – You couldn’t help doing it. A few days later Clementine reports that she has received a signed photograph from Mussolini. It is inscribed:        A la Signora Winston Churchill                 Devotamente ...”

“... Mussolini organised conferences of the CAUR (the Comitati d’Azione per l’Universalità di Roma), a kind of Italian Universism, which Quisling attended. At the Montreux conference in 1934 he spoke about the need to respect the rights of smaller nations in a future Europe – a theme to which he would return time and again during the war. He befriended ...”

“... to teenagers across the country (at almost the same time, Michael Gove was sending copies of the King James Bible, with a foreword by himself, to every school in England). The government also passed a law allowing it to appoint judges even if the opposition disagreed, and seven judges loyal to Fidesz duly joined the Constitutional Court. Orbán called this ...”

“... from the balconies of Italy’s great cities, Giuseppe Garibaldi pronounced the rousing words ‘Roma o morte’, inviting Italians to sacrifice their individual interests for the ideal of a unified nation-state. As the defining moment of his book, however, Pick does not choose Garibaldi’s defence of the Roman Republic of 1848-49, nor any of his great ...”

“... you could. GRANDMOTHER: Would you boys like to take sandwiches to school or come home at noon? KING: I’ll get back into that palace, I know I will. SHEEP: Sure you will. The ‘New York School’ poets’ apparent independence from worldly concerns, their elaborate self-reference and slippery in-jokes, can make the world of the Cedar Tavern seem ...”

“... Jubilee Session. No other reigning sovereign had visited the principal university buildings since King Edward VII opened them in 1905. Six months before the Queen’s visit, the Vice-Chancellor, Professor J.M. Whittaker, put to his recently-appointed Professor of English Literature a ‘general idea’ – to celebrate the Queen’s visit by reviving the ...”

“... Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?’Once upon a time there was …        ‘A King!’ my little readers will say at once.        No, children, you are wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.All children, except one, grow up.All children grow up: those who write for children need, therefore, to write fiction that will ...”

“... all recruits, they were required to hold a Bible and take the oath of allegiance to His Majesty King George the Fifth, his heirs and successors. According to Joe’s army record, he was demobilised three years later with ‘good character’, and no medals to suggest that his intention was anything other than to stay alive.I sent a copy of Joe’s ...”

“... trifle.Stamps. Donald started a new album, ‘EGYPT’. On the first page, a collage of stamps of King Farouk, who, like Michael of Romania, was a boy at his accession. The stamps are the first issue of his reign, designed in 1937. Later in the album we find the revised design of 1944, by which time Farouk was 24 and wearing a manly moustache on his rather ...”

“... Estonia. By the end of 1996, the UNHCR was alarmed by the ‘significant numbers’ of Slovaks and Roma rendered stateless, in effect, by the creation of Slovakia and the Czech Republic. In the 1930s, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia had been exemplary hosts to large refugee populations. It was now the turn of former Yugoslav and Czechoslovak nationals ...”

“... revelations that he frequented an S&M brothel. Romania sent a team only because the newly crowned King Carol II insisted and picked the squad. There were meant to be a nicely symmetrical as well as regionally representative sixteen teams, but the two Asian invitees, Japan and Siam, withdrew, and Egypt (who had reached the Olympic semis in 1928) literally ...”

“... just become minister of the interior, and was sending away refugee boats and trying to expel the Roma. Meanwhile, here I was, still talking about my college novel. My event was the last on the programme, and workers were already dismantling the other stages, in a joyful and noisy fashion. The interviewer, a veteran journalist of international affairs and the ...”