“... him guilty of sodomy. But there was no evidence that he had buggered anyone. A male servant, Florence Fitzpatrick, after being given a promise of immunity, had confessed to mutual masturbation. The Law Lords maintained that this was a sexual practice sufficiently unnatural to count as sodomy (a view which later courts were to dismiss as a bad ...”

“... The Prince is dedicated) had read Machiavelli’s book, ‘they grabbed the principality of Florence, and turned the republic into a duchy.’ The stage was set for Machiavelli as a republican cacodemon too devious for his own good. In Elizabethan and Jacobean drama ‘Machiavel’ was the stock tag for a personification of evil. In Henry VI Part ...”

“... is the national anthem, so it’s a bit like having a British political party called God Save the King). One of the party’s early symbols was a knotted red, white and green rope, though it has since reverted to the fiamma tricolore.The PdL, Lega Nord and FdI ran together in the 2013 election, losing narrowly – the margin was less than half a percentage ...”

“... the linen sheets he had slept on were reverently folded away, unwashed. One was kept by Florence Macdonald, to be her burial shroud, and the other, many years later, was wrapped around Flora herself before she was laid in her coffin. There were more adventures and forced marches by night before Flora finally said farewell to the prince in an upper ...”

“... that Albania didn’t really have one.In the postwar years, Albania became more royal than the king. It broke with the Soviet Union after Khrushchev tried to shut down the Stalin cult in 1956. It broke with China in the late 1970s when Hoxha sensed Beijing was cosying up to the West (Mao, Hoxha decided, had been playing a Marxist-Leninist when in fact he ...”

“... glass. All these things had been eliminated by 1525, as Zwingli’s Zurich outdid Savonarola’s Florence in the burning of vanities and the denunciation of frivolity. Wherever they are in Europe, Zwingli’s heirs have generally become more reasonable. They don’t now judicially drown Christians they disagree with in rivers, as Zwingli’s friends on the ...”

“... well-known preference for republics over monarchies? What about his view that contemporary Florence needed a governo largo rather than a governo stretto? What of the opinion expressed in the Discourses that the masses (la moltitudine), when entrusted with power, ‘are more knowing and more constant than is a prince’? The replies that Mansfield ...”

“... were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life out of the story of this king.’ To the 17th-century republicans Edmund Ludlow and Algernon Sidney, Henry would be ‘that monster of mankind’, ‘one of the most violent princes we ever had’. To Bolingbroke in the 18th century, Henry’s would appear the most ‘severe’ of ...”

“... was stage-managed by Scott) – opposite the playbill for a production in 1823 of Shakespeare’s King John at the Theatre Royal, which boasted an ‘Attention to Costume never before equalled on the English Stage’. A playbill for a production of Shakespeare’s ‘King John’ in 1823. The century before Scott’s ...”

“... This was Coleridge’s harmless bird ‘that loved the man who shot him’; Baudelaire’s ‘king of the blue’ brought ‘stumbling and ashamed’ into the orbit of men.You could make a research appointment, I discovered, at UCL’s Grant Museum of Zoology, and the albatross would be taken out of the cabinet so you could see it up close. ‘As we are ...”

“... of Oxford, ranger of Snowdon Forest, or high steward of Windsor, Bristol, Reading, Abingdon, King’s Lynn, Great Yarmouth, Wallingford, Tewkesbury and St Albans – that he didn’t manage to visit Kenilworth once during the first three years he owned it. Despite the elaborate heraldry he had carved into the walls of the castle, he was an ...”

“... to elope. After this the quest for a respectable husband became urgent. It settled on William King, later earl of Lovelace. The marriage was based on real affection and was a considerable success for some time, although the bride of science made no secret of the fact that she found children, including her own, boring. ‘The less I have habitually to do ...”

“... travelled up and down the Italian peninsula as insurrections broke out in Milan, Venice, Turin, Florence and many lesser cities. This stirring background music exposed the danger latent in the pope’s relationship with the crowd. Did he really have a choice whether or not to bestow his blessing when thirty thousand citizens gathered in front of his palace ...”

“... the driver whenever a cab was called, and was half-mad with excitement at Christmas. She told Florence Hardy that she ‘never outgrew the snowflakes’. And yet when she was only seven two of her brothers died – one a baby, one, her great playmate, a six-year-old. Lotti, as was then considered right, was taken in to see him in his coffin. The steadying ...”

“... polls, well ahead of the centre-right. In the autumn of 2012, challenged by the youthful mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, who had made a name for himself by calling for the entire older generation of politicians to be broken up in the junkyard, Bersani comfortably defeated him in the party primaries, on a substantial turnout that raised the standing of the ...”