“... Bertie – now 21 – ‘shows more and more how totally, totally unfit he is for ever becoming King!’ Neither Victoria nor the constitution could prevent him from ascending to the throne on her death. It didn’t matter. Bertie – this generally amiable but foolish and corpulent cigar-smoking, tiger-shooting adulterer – was a perfectly respectable ...”

“... who had the strangest start in life. Her parents, Charles and Isabella Hadfield, had settled in Florence where they ran an inn, Carlo’s, on the left bank of the Arno, which catered for the flow of Grand Tourists from England and Scotland. Even the most sophisticated of travellers might be homesick and the painter Thomas Jones was one of those who found ...”

“... of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem that is even older, about the adventures of the historical king of Uruk, who ruled in the 27th century BCE. The indentations on the tablet report that the gods sent a flood to destroy mankind, and that one of the gods, Ea, warned Utnapishtim, king of Shuruppak in southern Iraq, who ...”

“... Italian the shared language of his friends and colleagues. He read Machiavelli (History of Florence as well as The Prince), Petrarch and Castiglione’s manual for the courtier, Il Cortegiano – important reading for the attorney from Putney. He was on equal terms with university scholars like Cranmer, a don to his fingertips. But Cromwell never lost ...”

“... was the prime instigator of the legal moves that culminated in the ATF raid last February. Martin King, an Australian television reporter who interviewed Koresh before the siege, has in-corporated into his narrative parts of Breault’s original diary, as well as extensive interviews with him. The Jonestown massacre in Guyana in 1978, in which the leader of ...”

“... della Francesca, the other exceptional Italian painter of this period to work largely outside Florence or Venice, Antonello has become a means of justifying and explaining a range of ideas and practices.This process began in the decades after his death. Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) was the first to suggest that Antonello went to the Low Countries. According ...”

“... after the Crimean War and Indian Mutiny had resulted in large numbers of men being sent overseas. Florence Nightingale’s demonstration that the casualties from sickness exceeded those from battle some threefold was instrumental in setting up the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army in 1857 and a similar one for the Army in India in 1859. The findings ...”

“... understanding of Christianity as creed, not lineage, that had held for more than a millennium. The king and the pope both opposed the restrictions, yet they were widely adopted across Spain and then Portugal, especially after a later, Spanish pope, Alexander VI, approved blood purity statutes in 1495. By the end of the 15th century, as Francisco Bethencourt ...”

“... city fell in 1453, the text migrated to Europe in the satchels of fleeing Greek scholars, and in Florence in 1474 it became the first book to be printed in Greek, more than a decade before the Iliad and the Odyssey. It soon started circulating in Latin translation as an excellent introductory text for the burgeoning Philhellenes of the Renaissance.Now comes ...”

“... explorers – Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, David Livingstone, Samuel Baker (with his wife, Florence), Henry Morton Stanley and James Grant – slogged out on their respective expeditions through East and Central Africa, and engaged in an intense and bitter battle over who exactly could claim to have solved the ‘mystery of the Nile’, a mystery that ...”

“... well imitate, ‘to use a gold and silver coinage and to engage in retail trade.’ (The riches of King Croesus of Lydia are still proverbial.) A little later, gold coins are struck in Iran to the east and mainland Greece to the west. Both regions are conquered and united by Alexander. Thenceforth gold and silver coinages fan out across the world. In modern ...”

“... he studied painting in Copenhagen and in 1798 moved to Dresden, the so-called or self-styled ‘Florence on the Elbe’, where he died in 1840. A major retrospective of his work is currently on show at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg (until 1 April). It commemorates the 250th anniversary of his birth and will travel across the Atlantic next year to give Friedrich ...”

“... of Dubai, the Sabahs of Kuwait and the Thanis of Qatar mirror the Borgias of Rome, the Medicis of Florence, the Sforzas of Milan, the Estes of Ferrara. The three pillars of the old order – clans, tribes and clerics – are tumbling down. It is in Saudi Arabia, again, that the transition is most striking. Since 1953, the succession had passed horizontally ...”

“... they have encountered over the centuries in combining the roles of temporal and spiritual leader, king and priest – ‘two powers in one body’, as an anonymous 17th-century writer once put it. As a temporal ruler Alexander VII controlled only a mini-state with about a million inhabitants, about a twentieth of the size of the France of Louis XIV. There was ...”

“... he considered priest-ridden and decadent, and for its spectacularly dysfunctional ruling family (King Carlos IV was mentally unstable; real power lay with the royal favourite Manuel Godoy, Queen Maria Luisa’s lover; the heir to the throne Fernando plotted against them all). In May 1808, Napoleon summoned the king and his ...”