Quotes from Simon Winder

The bags full of Turkish noses sent by the Uskoks from Senj to Charles V in 1532 may have been one of those gifts more fun to send than to receive,

Indeed, a parallel history of Europe could be written which viewed family life and regular work as the essential Continental motor of civilization. Then war and revolution would need to be seen by historians as startling, sick departures from that norm of a kind that require serious explanation, rather than viewing periods of gentle introversy as mere tiresome interludes before the next thrill-packed bloodbath.

It is the last place heading south before the landscape gets terminally dusty, glum and thinly settled, so it has an oasis or frontier atmosphere and a sense that the cappuccinos are a bit hard-won.

In the usual proto-Art-Nouveau style, the sculptor follows through on an ethnographic hunch that surprising numbers of the tribal womenfolk would be in their late teens and free of clothing.

John of Bavaria, realizing the game was up and his throwing in the priesthood and marrying had just wasted everyone's time, made Philip the Good his heir. He was shortly thereafter assassinated in The Hague with a poisoned prayer book (yes, really – nothing can beat the fifteenth century).

academics more than anyone else are (with help from priests) some of the greatest villains.

The chances of anybody today being a 'pure' example of any specific medieval 'race' must be close to zero, quite aside from the category being patently meaningless.

The Golden Apple for Margarita Teresa's seventeenth birthday (a special present from 'uncle'), to which Leopold himself contributed several genuinely beautiful arias. This opera must have been something to see, so scenically unwieldy that it took two days to put on, but with spectacles of flames, thunderclaps, flying dragons and shipwrecks of a dangerousness and scale that we are sadly sheltered from today. Cesti's

Museums are obliged to denature and make dreary the impulse which led to an object's original creation. Serried rows of coins are like Panini football stickers in a more ponderous form. But as objects to be handled they tell an extraordinary story, from the most over-the-top gold monster to a clipped, almost featureless little square of rough metal used as emergency currency in the Siege of Vienna.

but I remained bouncy and immune throughout – by the early eighteenth century the Electors' tombs are entirely out of control and indeed strongly anticipatory of the fine moment in Fellini's Roma where the Vatican holds an excitingly modern ecclesiastical fashion show featuring neon-clad, roller-skating priests and entire reliquary skeletons of saints hanging like the Andrews Sisters from the sides of a jeep. Just

all of whom radiated level-headed competence, physical fitness and pride in appearance, and lived on a different planet from the one defined by general weak tittering, the oxygen levels of which I was more used to.

Jade Bay, the future site of Wilhelmshaven, is a huge semi-circle of land on the North Sea which, just to look at for a few moments from a blustery esplanade, would make most people lose the will to live, particularly once they have had to get there by walking through a haggard shopping centre featuring a man in Bavarian dress playing 'The Shiek of Araby' on his saxophone.

For much of the seventeenth century the border between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans had been relatively quiet – relatively in the sense that large-scale raiding did happen (baking in a level of violence which we would consider scarcely credible) but it was not by the standards of the time serious.

A new austerity and prayerful privacy reigned. Oddly, this shift moved almost in lockstep with the growth of public musical theatre, as through the now idle impresarios o f the Catholic Church found fresh work in opera and oratorio.