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* Jefferson decided to drop his vice-president, Aaron Burr, from the ticket. When Burr ran for New York governor, his old ally Hamilton called him an ‘unprincipled voluptuary’ and backed his opponent. Burr lost. On 11 July 1804, the men met to duel for their honour: Hamilton fired in the air but Burr shot him lethally in the stomach, shattering his liver. Burr fled but was never tried. Instead, rejected by the republic he had helped create, he planned to found an empire in the south-west, carved out of the Louisiana Purchase and Spanish Mexico. The details are murky, yet he probably imagined himself as emperor. If it seems preposterous now, this was a time when an obscure Corsican had made himself emperor of Europe. But when he approached the US commander, the latter informed Jefferson, who backed his prosecution. When Burr was acquitted, he left America, travelling in Europe, returning only in old age.

* Kamehameha married for both love and prestige: he married Keopuolani, daughter of King Kiwalao, whom he had sacrificed, but they lived separately. She had fourteen children, four by the king, ten by her lovers. But his chief adviser was his favourite, Queen Kaʻahumanu, funny, clever and weighing 500 pounds, whom he appointed regent.

* This Francisco de Miranda was one of the most extraordinary characters of his time. Born into privilege – until his father, a Spaniard noble who migrated to Caracas, was denounced for having impure (Jewish) blood; ultimately his father’s certificate of limpieza de sangre was confirmed but the disgusted young Miranda left Caracas, fighting for Spain, travelling to America where he befriended Washington and Jefferson, and to Russia, where he charmed Catherine and Potemkin, before fighting for the French revolution then being imprisoned by Robespierre. Surviving the Terror, he travelled for a decade to promote his vision of a revolt against Spain to create a united south America under a hereditary Inca, advised by himself.

* In February 1811, George III, increasingly blind and bewildered and heartbroken after the death of his daughter Amelia from TB, became permanently mad. Perceval activated the Regency Act; Prince George became prince regent. Like many a young radical, the prince had become more conservative with age. When Perceval was assassinated by a lunatic, he appointed the earl of Liverpool as prime minister, betraying his furious Whig friends. When the regent cut his former pals Beau Brummell and Lord Alvanley at a ball, Beau delivered the best put-down in royal history: ‘Alvanley, who’s your fat friend?’ Living in French exile for another twenty years, Brummell died half mad and penniless.

* Amid the bleakness, only the flashy courage of Marshal Murat, king of Naples, raised French morale – ‘a stage king in the studied elegance of his attire’, wrote an eyewitness, ‘a real king in his bravery and inexhaustible activity’. Easily ‘recognized by his dress’, recalled Napoleon, ‘he was a regular target for the enemy, and the Cossacks used to admire him on account of his astonishing bravery’.

* Napoleon had tried to create a European empire; Russia and Britain too were building empires but against much weaker opponents outside the core of Europe. Britain’s triumph at Trafalgar was to confine Napoleon within Europe, where he had to fight the most powerful militaries in the world. Now full victory over Napoleon propelled Britain to world eminence: by not seeking European hegemony, merely enforcing a balance of power, it could deploy its relatively small population and formidable resources of naval power and industry in an aggressive pursuit of world empire. The victory also granted Russian tsardom a confidence that masked its primitive weakness. Nonetheless 1814 along with 1945 are the moments of Russian imperial triumph. In April 1945, when Soviet troops liberated Berlin from the Nazis, US ambassador Averell Harriman congratulated Stalin. ‘Yes,’ replied the dictator, ‘but Alexander took Paris.’

* The diplomacy was negotiated in ballrooms and bedrooms, particularly in the Palm Palace where two female grandees held court. Metternich was in love with an intelligent, libertine potentate, Wilhelmine, duchess of Sagan, whose lands were in the Russian sphere; Alexander tormented the chancellor by sleeping with her. Metternich’s own part-time affair with the White Pussycat, the Russian princess Catherine Bagration, also known as the Naked Angel thanks to her see-through dresses and concupiscent techniques, was ruined when she switched to Alexander, feeding him intelligence. Metternich wept with frustration. Talleyrand was accompanied by his niece-mistress Dorothea, later duchess of Dino, thirty-nine years his junior, who supported his restoration of France while juggling her own young lovers.