“... cheer Duke Leopold II of Tuscany subsequently made their way to the Piedmontese legation to cheer Charles Albert, the king of Sardinia-Piedmont, and finally, with their spirits fired up, marched into the Piazza Venezia, where the Austrian legation was situated. As the foreign overlords of Lombardy and Venetia and the conservative Catholic hegemon on the ...”

“... of Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr for vice. They outpolled Adams and his running mate, Charles Pinckney, but in order for Jefferson to become president, one or more Republican electors had to avoid voting for Burr. They failed to get the message. Jefferson and Burr both ended up with 73 electoral votes, sending the contest to the House of ...”

“... abolition of slavery; the Indian liberal Dadabhai Naoroji criticised ‘un-British rule’ in the hope of realising the economic prosperity that ‘true British rule’ promised. When such approaches were rebuffed, anticolonialism and independence gradually came to seem the more likely route towards self-rule and equality. But as late as the interwar period ...”

“... that very ugly skirmish with the dragoon Masi, probably instigated by the authorities in the hope of dislodging the Gamba family and their radical English associates from that part of Italy – could have done with more and sharper attention. In some ways, the second half of Seymour’s biography, dealing with Mary Shelley’s life between her ...”

“... In 1629, King Charles I granted the Massachusetts Bay Company a standard commercial charter containing a clerical slip that changed the world. The document charged the stockholders with duly electing a board of management – a governor and 18 assistants – and holding them to account at quarterly meetings. However, crown officials failed to specify where the company headquarters should be (London would have been the usual assumption) and the wily leaders of the company absconded to New England, where they transformed quarterly meetings into government sessions, stockholders into freemen, assistants into magistrates, the governor into a Governor, and then piously declared their new regime to be ‘a city on a hill’ ready to serve as a model of divinely inspired governance for the rest of the world (well, for England, which came to the same thing ...”

“... anonymous consumers of pornography, and the Holy Roman Emperor. Correggio’s Loves were given to Charles V by Federico Gonzaga; Perino’s tapestries were woven for his visit to Genoa, and the gallery of Francis I was hurriedly completed for Charles’s visit in 1539. To a remarkable degree the audience for all these ...”

“... stereotypes himself as the grammar-school boy perverted by his ‘milieu’ (fellow-con Charles Richardson’s Open University-speak), Boyle creates an extraordinarily vivid and well-written portrait of the criminal as a young urchin. It is done without nostalgia, posing or special pleading. The childhood chapters are far and away the best thing in ...”

“... would suffice (the tunic Mary wore at the annunciation is preserved at Chartres). In 1267, Charles II, count of Provence, dug up the bones in Vézelay that local tradition held were Mary Magdalene’s and took the left foot to St-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume; thirteen years later he dug them up again and this time found a piece of ‘living skin’ – said ...”

“... six-month journey via Rhodes and Athens, but stayed outside the sacred boundary of the city in the hope of being granted a formal triumph. He was, once again, disappointed. By now, Pompey and Caesar had broken with each other: in 50, Pompey, after much vacillation, had sided with senatorial hardliners in demanding that Caesar lay down his command and return to ...”

“... and outlives the majority of human passions: Dante’s is one of those which one can only just hope to grow up to at the end of life.’ Moreover, Eliot was sceptical about the capacity of style to preserve dead subject-matter. Discussing journalism in his essay ‘Charles Whibley’, he writes: ‘literary style is ...”

“... used the seductive physical power of music with the intensity and the range of Mozart,’ says Charles Rosen in The Classical Style. Glenn Gould thought Mozart’s music was ‘hedonist’. The immediacy of Mozart’s music can be spooky. That simple four-note figure repeated twice, the viola motif in the slow movement of the G minor String ...”

“... They had doctors in the family, and crofters; the sort of people, she said, who had followed Charles Edward Stuart to the water’s edge. And she knew all the songs. Margaret told me once of her last days at Muir of Ord. She would go down the glen with her drawing-book and her colours, beyond the fir trees and the water over stones, to the open ...”

“... husband, Henry Lord Darnley, was, Dunn reports, ‘the tallest young man a tall young queen could hope to meet.’ John Guy writes in My Heart Is My Own: ‘He was more effeminate and baby-faced than his father, but the implications of that were not yet talked about.’ And later: ‘He was almost certainly bisexual, as was the vogue of young hedonistic ...”

“... had long ago laid down for the traveller in exotic places. The Chinese are said proverbially to hope to live in uninteresting times, but the local times were unusually interesting when Segalen arrived in Peking, and he made good use of them. After three hundred years, the Manchu dynasty was just about at an end. A year earlier, the Emperor Kuang-Hsu had ...”

“... parallel universe, a parallel Martin Amis is dreaming up a potplant-lecturing, tampon-envying Charles III.) Henry has a tremendously posh voice (‘My mind’s a blenk’); he is pampered and cosseted and none too bright, given to calling things ‘ghastly’ or ‘a curate’s egg’. Otherwise, he comes across as a fairly likeable ...”