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“... and stonemason: so were two of his four brothers, Joseph and Mark. Robert became a jeweller, while Charles was a churchman, who moved to India where he became a chaplain in Delhi as well as a folklorist. The stories contained in his book Romantic Tales from the Punjab, were, he said, of the ‘highest possible antiquity, being older than the Jatakas, older ...”

“... of them survive today. They were ordered from the engineer brothers Jacques-Constantin and Auguste-Charles Périer, and constructed by François-Étienne Calla, a former technician for Vaucanson. In his Tableau de Paris (1781-88), Louis-Sébastien Mercier described with enthusiasm the ‘curious and useful’ nature of this project, which was still then in ...”

“... the machines people build for more everyday tasks. Even now, when the carparks at Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle are filled with sleek creations, art-directed to the max by Mercedes and Renault to convey futurity, Concorde still looks as if a crack has opened in the fabric of the Universe and a message from tomorrow has been poked through. Age ...”

“... Piedmontese. Maximilian was so depressed he dreamed of becoming Belgian, like his father-in-law, King Leopold. A Saxe-Coburg princeling whose first wife had died in childbirth before she could inherit the British throne, Leopold had been installed as king of the new Belgian state created by the 1830 revolutions. Having ...”

“... royal, the infant to whom they were given was unquestionably so, being none other than the future King of Kings himself. Monarchs, this story reminds us, not only make benefactions they also receive them – which adds a suggestively majestic connotation to the otherwise plebeian notion of ‘give and take’. British sovereigns have until relatively recently ...”

“... by Sir Henry Marten of Eton. Time for a change? Lady Longford gives us to understand that Prince Charles is an expert on the subject, as he probably needs be in self-defence; it is to be hoped that he has supplemented these studies by meditation on the appropriate bits of Blackstone. Mercifully, however, royal personages are dependent on books for only a ...”

“... secured by the Glorious Revolution, but several years before it, as an urgent and daring attack on Charles II’s bid for absolutism. It was less an abstract statement of principle than an exercise in persuasion. What was true of Locke’s work, historians soon learned to remind themselves, was equally so of all the great books in that broad movement of ...”

“... as Serbia, independent only since 1878, moved out of the Habsburg orbit. In 1903, the country’s king, Aleksander Obrenovic, and his wife were assassinated in the palace by a cabal of army officers. The headstrong king had displeased his subjects by marrying a woman who’d been one of his mother’s ladies-in-waiting, and ...”

“... The romance of Apollonius of Tyre opens with the classic fairy-tale couple: the king and his daughter. Antiochus is powerful, she is beautiful, and of marriageable age – there is no mother. The difference is that, in this variation, she will not leave home to marry a prince, for her father Antiochus ‘began to love her in a way unsuitable for a father ...”

“... the Venerable Bede, and its modern exponents include such engaging and stylish writers as Charles Thomas, Leslie Alcock and Henry Mayr-Harting. The literary sources have attracted much idiosyncratic talent, for they possess the fascination of a cryptic crossword in which one must sift fact from propaganda, post-Norman Conquest forgery from dimly ...”

“... more than 150 illustrations.‘I do warrant you,’ the lord admiral of the English fleet, Charles Howard of Effingham, reported from his flagship, ‘all the world never saw such a force as theirs.’ When it left Lisbon harbour on 28 May 1588, the Armada comprised 150 vessels, ranging from thousand-ton merchantmen to small felucca message boats. The ...”

“... is no evidence of strong confessional conviction. After a return to Paris as tutor to the son of Charles de Cossé, Comte de Brissac and Maréchal de France, it is clear that in ‘the France of Henri II and the chambre ardente’, he enjoyed the reputation of an orthodox if undemonstrative Catholic. Buchanan appears to have left the employ of the Comte de ...”

“... and fierce about foreign influence, but in London and Paris she was a painter to be reckoned with. Charles Estienne, a significant French critic, became her champion, and Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia thought highly of her giant abstracts at the Musée d’Art Moderne. She painted My Hell in her studio on the third floor of the Iraqi ambassador’s ...”

“... was so well known in the Middle Ages that he was depicted on an object produced for a European king: the Catalan Atlas, attributed to the Jewish cartographer Abraham Cresques (1325-87) and commissioned for Charles V of France by his cousin Pedro IV of Aragon. Musa is shown seated on his throne, wearing a gold crown and ...”

“... of Peleus and Thetis, and one from a century later showing Achilles fighting a duel with Memnon, king of the ‘Ethiopians’; as well as an amphora depicting Ajax, in full armour, passing one of the long days of the siege by playing a board game; another shows him falling on his sword. If you don’t remember many of these scenes from Homer, that’s ...”