George II. The full list of daughters surviving infancy included: Anne, Princess Royal and later Princess of Orange; Princess Amelia, who never married (though there is a legend she had an affair which resulted in the birth of the composer Samuel Arnold); Princess Caroline, who never married; Princess Mary, who married Landgrave Frederick of Hesse-Kassel (very unhappily); Princess Louise, who was adored by her Scandinavian subjects but who died due to complications in pregnancy at the age of 27.

Lloyd George. This was in a speech he gave in Newcastle in 1909 during the crisis over his ‘People’s Budget’, which introduced a number of radical welfare programmes and proposed to pay for them by raising taxes on the rich. Many people, including dukes, lobbied against it and it led to a constitutional crisis when the House of Lords vetoed it. There are several variations on the quote as Lloyd George would have used the quip in many speeches. In one in London he reportedly said a Duke was as costly as a Dreadnought but was “much less easy to scrap”.

John Milton. A supporter of the Parliamentary cause in the Civil Wars, he was appointed to the office by the Commonwealth Council of State; his main job was to translate correspondence with foreign governments into Latin, but he also produced propaganda for the new regime.

Marie Curie. Marie Curie shared the 1903 Physics prize with Henri Becquerel and her husband Pierre and went on to win the 1911 prize in Chemistry, making her the only person to win a Nobel in two different sciences. In 1935 her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie shared the Chemistry prize with her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie (he changed his surname from plain Joliot when they married) for their discovery of artificial radioactivity. All the others on the list won the Peace or Literature prizes.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italy. Italy was allied to Prussia during the latter’s brief war against the Empire in the summer of 1866. While Prussia and its German allies secured a rapid victory over the Empire (and its German allies) to establish Prussian dominance over the German states, Italy’s almost-separate conflict (to Italians the war is the Third War of Independence) went less well, resulting in defeat on land at Custoza and at sea at Lissa. The resulting peace of Prague resulted in Venetia being ceded to Italy thanks to its powerful German friends.

Short Sunderland. The Short Empire was the culmination in a series of flying boats built by Short Brothers at their Rochester factory, commissioned by Imperial Airways to carry mail to various parts of the British empire. They also took passengers – by 1939 you could fly to Australia in ten days with nine overnight hotel stops. The Sunderland was a military spin-off ordered in 1937. Operated by RAF Coastal Command during WW2 its long range meant it could patrol far out into the Atlantic. The Germans are supposed to have nicknamed it ‘the flying porcupine’ on account of its large defensive armament and profusion of radar and radio masts.

Smyrna. Settlement on the site goes back probably to the third millennium BC or earlier, but it flourished after Alexander the Great is supposed to have ordered the city’s restoration. It remained one of the most important cities of Asia Minor, with wealth based on trade, until the emergence of Constantinople as the capital of the eastern empire.