“... and prestige, rather than new loves or old, the character of The Leopard’s originator emerges in David Gilmour’s entertaining and astute biography. There is at times, but only at times, an excess of reserve – caught from his subject’s own fastidiousness? In the brief, lyrical memoir Lampedusa wrote in 1955, he invoked with unequivocal passion the ...”

“... but overdue crackdown on racketeers. Both Lansky and Trafficante, the Tampa-based numbers king who became the second most important crime figure in Havana, were prosecuted. Both got off lightly, but their businesses were damaged; suddenly, they needed a new venue. Havana beckoned, indeed it rolled out the red carpet, with Cuban officials making Lansky ...”

“... a few months as minister of the interior and was expecting promotion to the top post when the King, inexplicably for Fraga, appointed Suarez instead. At the 1977 election Suarez’s party won 165 seats and Fraga’s Alianza Popular only 16, a disparity which at the subsequent election was even greater. But before the 1982 contest the UCD dismissed Suarez ...”

“... in the south-eastern hamlet of Saint-Etienne de Saint-Geoirs foreshadowed his career as a bandit king. But his father’s early death pushed the family towards increasingly risky business ventures. In 1748, the 23-year-old Louis signed a large contract to supply French army camps in the Italian Alps with food, and together with two partners organised a ...”

“... Palmier’s sombre encyclopedia of exile, published in French in 1987 and now translated by David Fernbach, offers seemingly endless evidence of the ways in which exile often punished over and over again those who fled Germany after 1933. One story is symptomatic. Hans Bendgens-Henner, a pacifist refugee who had first settled in Holland, was expelled ...”

“... which has recently been brilliantly treated in a collection of essays edited by Jenny Doctor, David Wright and Nicholas Kenyon.* In terms (for instance) of its performing space, the crucial dates were 1893 and 1941 (when the Queen’s Hall was destroyed and the concerts moved to the Albert Hall); in terms of sponsorship and organisation, the key years ...”

“... in my view, but that’s a topic for another day.)The head scientist at Nvidia was a man called David Kirk. As he told Witt,‘with parallel computing, it really took us a fair amount of convincing to talk Jensen into it … Same with CUDA. We really had to make the business case.’ But with AI, Huang experienced a Damascene epiphany. ‘He got it ...”

“... beggars in West African market places go mad in a style which resembles that of Poor Tom in King Lear. It may be that Pratt is acting out the cycle of manic depression because he has heard of it (like a Theory of Humours) and thinks he ought to follow the pattern. Two of Pratt’s three doctors are nicknamed Dr Phyz and Dr Psyches, the latter being ...”

“... completed with the addition of Landseer’s lions. The first major Wellington statue was placed, King Kong-like, atop Decimus Burton’s arch on Constitution Hill in 1846, but was so derided that it was removed in 1883 and consigned to the rustic obscurity of Aldershot’s military scrubland. A second official monument to the Iron Duke had been in the making ...”

“... as the 1750s, in sermons, poems, ballads and silk sashes that bore the message ‘long live the king.’ Frederick and his successors were adept at playing up to the image. Frederick William IV, who acceded to the throne in 1840, was not the deluded romantic loon of so many accounts, but a monarch with a sharp appreciation of political symbols and how to ...”

“... Agincourt, to conquer Normandy and to win the crown of France. It was a providential escape for a king K.B. McFarlane called ‘the greatest man that ever ruled England’, but as Malcolm Vale points out in the preface to his new book, it may have been formative in other ways: for all his military success, Henry would fight only one more battle, and there was ...”

“... and incest that dominated the proceedings against Marie-Antoinette? As for the execution of the King, even at the time observers did not fail to compare the spectacle to a ritual sacrifice offered up to the jealous goddess Liberty. Hunt takes as her starting point Freud’s classic investigation into the origins of religion and society in Totem and ...”

“... protested that this was the sort of arbitrary behaviour for which Cromwell had lambasted the late king, and demanded that the unjust tax be repaid to him. Cromwell first tried to browbeat Cony into submission, then threw him in prison. Cony’s lawyer, the eminent Sir John Maynard, demanded that he be set free, and the judges in the case were minded to ...”

“... were arguing vigorously that the journals and other descriptive writings of explorers such as David Thompson, Simon Fraser and Alexander MacKenzie were the first contributions to Canadian literature, and these works teem with a sense of the forests and prairies, lakes and rivers as the inexhaustible new land in which settlers had to strive to make ...”

“... Yet the price paid for good sources at this stage of history is that they rarely agree. Take King Harold’s arrow in the eye, a central icon of English history. We have a number of accounts of his death, all of which differ. What may well be the earliest version (though not all historians agree) has him cut down by William himself, together with the ...”