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“... or a watermark when a commercial partnership ended; after 1349 the new popular government of Florence integrated nobles into the regime by having them change their coats of arms. Interestingly, the painted portrait, so extensively developed in the 15th and 16th centuries, did not become a part of the various identity papers and objects that governments ...”

“... In Florence in 1348, shortly after two of its biggest banks collapsed because the English king had defaulted on a loan, roughly two-thirds of the population died of the Black Death. Egg-shaped buboes swelled up in the victims’ armpits or groins, and then black bruising spread across their bodies ...”

“... great Continental states which appeared in 1896: ‘Victor Emmanuel is the model constitutional king; Cavour, the ideal of a cool, far-sighted statesman; Garibaldi, the perfect chieftain in irregular war, dashing but rash and hot-headed; Mazzini, the typical conspirator, ardent and fanatical – all of them full of generosity and devotion.’ Mack Smith’s ...”

“... fables and fairy tales. His Pinocchio begins: Once upon a time there was . . . ‘A king!’ my little readers will say at once.   No, children, you’re wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood. In that sense Pinocchio has more in common with those postmodern children’s books in which nursery stories are upturned – The Stinky ...”

“... Leonardo’s​ work has always been in demand. Following his training in Florence he moved to Milan, where he worked for the duke, Ludovico Sforza. After a brief spell as a military engineer for Cesare Borgia, he returned to Florence. Then came a second period in Milan, a few years in Rome at the invitation of the pope and finally a summons by Francis I to France, where he died in 1519, aged 67 ...”

“... more of an affinity with animals than with people. When her father, Cosimo de’ Medici, duke of Florence, sends for a tigress from Bengal to add to his palace menagerie, she reaches out to touch the animal through the bars of its cage. Isabella, her spoilt elder sister, who likes jewels and court fashions and doesn’t listen in class, dismisses it as a ...”

“... In the 13th century, Florence banned its noble families from holding public office and instituted a republic. The names of a few hundred select citizens were placed in leather bags and every two months a new government was drawn by lot. In more conservative Venice, a group of nobles simply elected one of their number doge for life ...”

“... 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 from Shakespeare (1807) has an ...”

“... with his older brother and a few friends a little after midnight and set out to drive from Florence, Alabama to Dallas, Texas to hear a celebrated First Baptist pastor deliver a sermon. At four or five a.m. the boys arrived in Memphis, where they found themselves in a black part of town called Beale Street. It was ‘pouring down rain’, Phillips ...”

“... was Morris’s first book of poems, appearing in 1858, the year before Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Ballads inspired by (or possibly the inspiration of) Rossetti’s water-colours stand side by side with hard-edged Froissartian themes ‘The Haystack in the Floods’, ‘The Judgment of God’. Here Joyce Tompkins believes that modern readers are adrift ...”

“... here of Titian’s friend and public-relations manager, Pietro Aretino, and his greatest patron, King Philip of Spain, are rich in revealing detail and seem, by contrast, fully rounded. No reliable record survives of the way Titian conducted himself in the company of friends, let alone in private. The Ferrarese ambassador in 1522 claims that the artist is ...”

“... woman but a seriously overpowered woman. Vested with all the more exasperating attributes of Florence Nightingale and the Pankhursts, she lacked their organising skills. If she could not bend men to her will, she was ready to libel them or call for them to be horsewhipped. Though she looked on herself as a monkey among crocodiles, there were times when ...”

“... Since he has stripped it of the thin marital disguise of his wife’s name and cleared it of Florence’s editorial emendations carried out after Hardy’s death, he feels able to present it as ‘an entirely Hardyan text – an autobiography in short’. But it’s not an autobiography, nor was meant to be. The book itself declares that Hardy had not ...”

“... of the cell are Lecter’s drawings; one over the sink shows the Duomo and the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, seen from the Belvedere. Lecter is lying on his bunk, perusing the Italian edition of Vogue. ‘Dr Lecter’s eyes are maroon and they reflect the light in tiny points of red.’ Those maroon eyes might seem like a deliberately anti-realistic detail ...”

“... in a Massachusetts institution for the feeble-minded. In Sargent’s painting, the eldest girl, Florence, who was 14, leans against an oversized vase with her hands clasped in front of her and her enigmatic profile turned towards the darkness; the figure beside her is Jane, or Jeanie, born two years later. The girl in the red dress to the left is ...”