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* Sitting at the front of the orchestra who had been instructed to follow the conductor not the composer, Beethoven ‘threw himself back and forth like a madman. He stretched to his full height … crouched down to the floor … flailed about with his hands and feet as though he wanted to play all the instruments and sing all the chorus.’ As he died in 1826, he said, like Augustus, ‘Applaud, friends, the comedy is over.’ At his funeral, crowds lined the streets of Vienna.

* The families of slave owners – including the Duke of Leutchenberg (Empress Josephine’s son Eugene) – received Haitian payments for many generations, the only case of the descendants of liberated slaves themselves forced to compensate the descendants of their own masters. In 1843, Boyer was overthrown in popular protests; Santo Domingo rebelled and fought a war of independence to create the Dominican Republic; and, paying its last instalment in 1888, Haiti took out loans from US banks that it could not service.

* Alexandre Dumas, the son of Thomas-Alexandre ‘Black Devil’ Dumas, Haitian revolutionary general, was Louis Philippe’s librarian/secretary during the 1820s and took part in the 1830 revolution. Now he started to write stories based on his father’s adventures, including his uncle’s smuggling via a small Caribbean island, Montecristo. In 1844, his novel The Count of Monte-Cristo chronicled the perils of the ever-changing regimes in France. It was published in eighteen instalments in the Journal des Debats. Dumas became one of the commercial super-novelists who benefited from improved literacy and the proliferation of reader-hungry newspapers. The sales were colossal, but thanks to juggling a family and a lifestyle that involved building a Château de Monte-Cristo and forty mistresses, the irrepressible novelist was always broke, despite hiring a stable of writers to pump out bestsellers. Dumas flourished under Louis Philippe, though constantly confronting racism about his origins. ‘My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro,’ he would reply, ‘and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.’

* Balzac chronicled and rejected the horror of the new office life, an institution that dominated the days of millions in the west into the twenty-first century, fearing that as ‘a clerk, a machine … eating and drinking and sleeping at fixed hours, I should be like everyone else.’ He became, before Dickens, the first observer of the lives of clerks in his Les employés and his essay La physiologie de l’employe. ‘Bureaucracy,’ he said, ‘is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.’

* When Lord Liverpool suffered a stroke after the longest premiership of the last two centuries, the snootier grandees believed Canning could never succeed him. ‘The son of an actress is, ipso facto,’ said Earl Grey, ‘disqualified from becoming prime minister.’ But George IV appointed him. On his death after just 119 days, the next government collapsed after just 144 days and in January 1828 the king appointed Wellington.

* Such was the rancour inspired by Catholic emancipation that Wellington challenged a critic, the earl of Winchilsea, to a duel, held on 23 March 1829 in Battersea Fields. Both discharged their weapons harmlessly and honour was satisfied. This was the last prime ministerial duel.

* Louis Philippe’s lack of glamour encouraged Bonapartist dreams, centred around the heir, known as the Eaglet. In Vienna, Emperor Franz gave Napoleon’s son a regiment but prevented him from serving anywhere. On 22 July 1832 Napoleon-Franz died of TB, aged twenty-one. The young Adolf Hitler was obsessed with the duke of Reichstadt: in 1940, one of the first things he did on conquering France was to order Napoleon II’s reburial in the Invalides in Paris next to his father, as a gift to the French people.

* In 1833, this compensation formed ‘40 per cent of the government’s annual expenditure’, writes Michael Taylor, ‘and until the banking rescue package of 2008 it remained the largest specific payout in British history’. Baring Brothers initially bid to raise the vast loan, but its size was daunting. Grey turned to Nathan Rothschild and his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore, both supporters of abolition who deplored slavery as akin to the racist persecutions of Jewish people over many centuries. They regarded the raising of the loan as essential to delivering liberation, while they campaigned hard to overturn restrictions against Jews. Days after abolition passed, Parliament rejected the Jewish Civil Disabilities Repeal Bill. Britain ‘is a Christian country and a Christian legislature’, said Wellington. ‘This measure would remove that peculiar character.’