“... the most powerful woman in Europe, a defiantly hands-on female ruler whose marriage to Ferdinand, king of the lesser Spanish kingdom of Aragon, created the germ of modern Spain and marked the arrival of a formidable new power in world politics. Their conquest of the Moorish emirate of Granada and their deployment of the Inquisition, forced conversion ...”

“... the kings of Northumbria and Mercia and East Anglia and fell on Wessex over Twelfth Night 878, King Alfred ‘rallied his subjects’ (writes Edward James). ‘Rallied his subjects’ sounds more grown-up, more professional and political, than ‘burnt the cakes’ – though this is exactly the moment when ...”

“... more than anyone to make sure the city was ‘forgotten’. A Spartophile who admired the Spartan king Agesilaos to the point of hero worship, Xenophon detested the Thebans for the defeats they inflicted on Agesilaos himself and the Spartan army. He did his best to exclude them from Hellenica and to minimise their achievements. The historian Ephorus, his ...”

“... long history indeed – more than a thousand years of continuous existence, so far. This, writes James Campbell, is the defining contrast between England and the other great European states. Despite some redrawing of county boundaries in 1974, most of the administrative geography of England remains today much as it was in the tenth and 11th centuries. No ...”

“... which a cultural structure constructs a personage or an event as significant – the death of a king, say – Sahlins labels ‘instantiation’, the mediation by which an event modifies a structure (the death of Louis XVI) ‘totalisation’: ‘The claim is not that culture determines history, only that it organises it.’ Sahlins’s most celebrated ...”

“... like a Syrian. Having escaped from his worm-eaten cell, Melampous went on to cure the king’s impotence, ‘having learned’ from a vulture, a long-necked, hook-beaked bird, that when he was a boy the king’s father had threatened him with a gelding knife now embedded in the bark of a certain tree. Having ...”

“... legally enshrined, lethally enforced white supremacy to an end. Its national hero is Martin Luther King Jr. Far from giving way in the face of moral example and legal right, racial injustice rose to fever pitch during the 1960s. The third and deadliest Ku Klux Klan (succeeding the Southern Klan of the late 1860s and the national Klan of the 1920s) dynamited ...”

“... He was​ the greatest man since the Deluge.’ This assessment of Alexander von Humboldt by King Frederick William IV of Prussia, which Andrea Wulf quotes in her fine new biography, may be a slight exaggeration, but it reflects Humboldt’s extraordinary reputation among his contemporaries. On the centennial of his birth, 14 September 1869, elaborate celebrations were held all over the world; the front page of the New York Times was devoted to his achievements under a banner headline that said simply: HUMBOLDT ...”

“... back: ‘Nay, answer me; stand, and unfold yourself.’ Bernardo responds, ‘Long live the king!’, which is presumably a watchword acceptable to Francisco. But the whole tragedy that follows – and the Ghost, who enters the play and the stage within forty lines – proves this password to be dangerous, or at least ironical. The dead ...”

“... Good Hope, ‘for a period of one thousand years’. Together with his younger brother, the future James II and VII, and assorted London merchants, the king was set to make a fortune from gold, ivory and enslaved Africans trafficked from the Ivory Coast. While Howe’s antipathy to the monarchy ran deep, he was never one to ...”

“... for soldiers to carve out a corner of a foreign field three thousand miles away in Chesapeake Bay. James I, king during the Jamestown experiment (the plantation was named in his honour), was similarly minded to give his blessing to overseas projects only if they didn’t cost him anything. Everything was done on a wing and a ...”

“... Bengal. She got out of this by eloping to Ireland with her mother’s admirer, Lieutenant Thomas James. The shotgun marriage soon failed, however, and she escaped by way of another scandalous affair, with another lieutenant (called Lennox), who dumped her penniless in London just as James began suing for adultery. Rather ...”

“... depending on ‘both the quality or otherwise of the audience and Lola’s mood each night’, as James Morton writes in his entertaining biography. And sometimes ‘it depended on what money was thrown on stage.’ More or fewer parts of Lola’s body might be exposed during the dance, which was in two parts. In the first, she played the spider, spinning its ...”

“... Gallery, painted around 1620 when he was just out of his teens, with the Metropolitan Museum’s James Stuart, Fourth Duke of Lennox, painted in 1633. The former is a small picture: you look at it close. Threads of white paint highlight the old man’s hair, beard, watering eye and damp lip. Paint and flesh exchange substance. The same is true of a picture ...”

“... is too alert and understated to try to be wise after the event. Foden’s first novel, The Last King of Scotland, was equally restrained, relying on the tacit and equivocal. Its closed-mouthed narrator keeps tabs on his emotions and ignores much of his past. Nicholas Garrigan is a young doctor from Edinburgh, on secondment in Uganda and wet behind the ...”