“... Moreover, the wandering apprentices of Central Europe and the great military leaders like Charles VIII of France had one thing in common: they saw the world and came home with a great desire to enjoy new comforts and practise new skills. In material as in high culture, some local traditions resisted while others yielded, and still others were merged ...”

“... starts by announcing his subject’s date of birth; unlike most biographers, he gets it wrong. Charles Henry Maxwell Knight was born on 9 July 1900, not 4 September, under the sign of Cancer, not Virgo, however tempting it may be, for reasons which become clear in the course of the story, to assign him to the latter. Information about Maxwell Knight is ...”

“... In some instances, we might wish we knew the questions that sparked his answers. Writing to thank Charles Dodgson for a photographic portrait taken on a visit to Christ Church in January 1861, Faraday offered the following notes on Dodgson’s (lost) queries: The ammonia comes from the cheese evolved by a slow action analogous to decay. You may see the ...”

“... prostitution and incest (the play opens as Pericles discovers the incestuous relationship between King Antiochus and his daughter, and has to flee the murderer dispatched to silence him). The versions of Pericles that were performed or printed tended to cut out, or minimise, these elements. Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales ...”

“... followed by Max Beerbohm, Sainte-Beuve and John Aubrey. A brusque kiss-off to Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, La Bruyère and the best of Mencken, not to mention Svetonius’s Lives of the Caesars; and into the garbage goes Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, perhaps the finest book of profile-essays ever written ... I am not, of course, claiming a place ...”

“... Analects, ‘it benefits all things and does not compete with them.’ Merlin turns the future king into a fish as part of his education in T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, and as a fish ‘he could do what men always wanted to do, that is fly. There is practically no difference between flying in water and flying in the air … It was like the dreams ...”

“... mostly took Hemingway at his macho word and accepted the Life magazine image of him as a bearded king. It took the shock of his suicide to show the thin ice on which his sovereignty stood, and the black depths below.) Despite the formal and practical advantages of waiting, financially it is better to strike while the body is still warm. Editors and agents ...”

“... do-nothings; also like Hunt (whose earliest recollection was of his father’s room in the King’s Bench prison in 1784), he seems to have spent his entire life in debt. A century and a half after the publication of Bleak House, the shadow of Skimpole is lifting. Whatever Hunt’s faults, he was manifestly neither an idler nor a scoundrel, and there ...”

“... it would be fun to sign the visitors’ book, is unknowable. The big fish Brewer catches is Charles Babbage, who came in 1828. Despite being on what was supposed to be a rest cure, he and a friend had themselves lowered on ropes into the crater. Their guide, the resilient Madonna, declined to join them. But all Babbage appears to have written in the ...”

“... encounters. An English journalist protests his eagerness to spill Duke’s revelations of the King onto the page. The two men haggle and conspire, and Duke blackmails his old friend. This cameo of the turncoat arises out of Bleasdale’s desire to ‘redress the balance’ in Elvis affairs after Goldman and ‘that book’, although much of his villain ...”

“... for him. He was to marry his first cousin, Victoria, a few months his senior, and as de facto king of England he would work for the creation of a united Germany under Prussia. Studious, intelligent and good-natured, Albert put his shoulder to the dynastic wheel. By the age of 16 he was writing an essay on German national character. Victoria ...”

“... in Venice some time around Hanukkah in 1523. Calling himself ‘son of Solomon and brother to King Joseph’, ruler of the lost tribes of Reuben, Gad and Manasseh that dwelt in the far east of myth, beyond the Sambatyon (‘a river so Jewish it observed the Sabbath’), David sought (and even more surprisingly received) audiences with Pope Clement VII and ...”

“... a ferry that sank in the Firth of Forth carrying a large quantity of gold and silver belonging to Charles I, the tomb of King Alaric I and treasure from King John’s baggage train. Oh, and the lost city of Atlantis. What Merlin Burrows is selling often seems too good to be true, but ...”

“... than as model). Lady Anne Monson, the British botanist of Indian plants, toasted Linnaeus as ‘king of all the realms of nature’ before raising her glass to George III, who was king merely of Britain and Ireland.Until his eyesight failed him in old age, he prided himself on being able to recognise hundreds if not ...”

“... clear. Watergate fans will recognise the old cast of characters, those almost-forgotten names – Charles Colson, David Young, Egil ‘Bud’ Krogh – and there is pleasure in this: a bit like watching an old horror film on late-night TV. Yet on that level Mr Hersh is not exciting. We know the Watergate story from every angle and, by now, from the memoirs of ...”