The World

* Later, accompanied by his daughter Indira and her daughter Pamela, Nehru and Edwina holidayed at Orissa; Nehru also visited Broadlands, Mountbatten’s house, eight times. Edwina Mountbatten died in 1960. In 1981, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, who had met his cousin Tsar Nicholas II as a child before the First World War and served as Britain’s chief of the defence staff under both Conservative and Labour governments up to 1965, was assassinated by IRA terrorists while fishing near his Irish castle in Sligo.

* Neither country had ever existed before and both are failed states. Lebanon, a fragile concoction of Christian Maronite, better-off Sunnis, poor Shiites and martial Druze, was designed by the French to protect their Christian favourites, storing up resentment of the Shiites. Syria was a conglomerate of Sunnis, Alawites, Kurds and Druze. Lebanon, ruled by venal magnates and sectarian warlords, has been cursed with civil wars, Palestinian intervention, Israeli invasion, state capture by a Shiite resistance movement and, in the 2020s, collapse. And in 2012, Syria dissolved into civil war.

* The new country was going to be called either Judaea or Israel and they chose Israel.

* Tsar Simeon of Bulgaria, Foxy’s grandson, was deposed by plebiscite in 1944. Bulgaria, run by Stalin’s trusted henchman Dmitrov, became a people’s republic.

* Tito helped an obscure Communist schoolteacher, Enver Hoxha, to seize power in his minuscule neighbour, Albania. Hoxha was handsome, tall, garrulous and strangely literary, writing diaries and memoirs – sixty-five volumes in all. Ruling through a tiny intermarried cabal that lived in an ugly heavily guarded street in mid-Tirana called Blloku

(the Block), Comrade Enver systematically murdered all rivals: ‘Irfan Ohri must be tracked down and killed,’ read a typical note. ‘I believe he’s staying at a house near the Rex Cinema.’ Even as he took power in November 1944, he ordered, ‘Set up prisons and concentration camps; don’t show mercy to anyone,’ adding, ‘Stop, arrest and execute influential individuals.’ Hoxha worshipped Stalin, whom he met for long conversations.

* Some of the most evil escaped down the ‘Ratline’ to South America where a new Argentine dictator, Colonel Juan Perón, an admirer of Hitler, gave refuge to Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele and Ante Pavelić. Pavelić died two years after an attempted assassination; Eichmann was kidnapped by Mossad and hanged in Jerusalem. Mengele drowned.

* ‘Not since Athens and Sparta, not since Rome and Carthage,’ Deputy Secretary of State Dean Acheson told US senators, ‘have we had such a polarization of power.’

* Chiang established an independent republic ruled by the Song and Chiang families. Chiang had lost 550 million people and now ruled six million, subdued by waves of terror and ruled by mainlanders for the next half-century. Reigning there as dictator for the rest of his life, he was succeeded like an emperor by his Russian-educated son, Ching-kuo, who introduced democracy. Taiwan’s liberal democracy, home to a sophisticated semiconductor industry, was protected by the USA into the 2020s. But it remains the last Chinese entity outside Beijing’s control.

* Puyi on the other hand was not getting the royal treatment. In 1945, Japan’s puppet emperor had abdicated and then been captured by the Soviets, who repatriated him. He was forced to perform menial jobs, though Mao encouraged him to write his memoirs. In 1960, Premier Zhou Enlai received him: ‘You weren’t responsible for becoming emperor at the age of three or the 1917 attempted restoration coup. But you were fully to blame … when you agreed to become Manchukuo Chief Executive.’ Puyi agreed, wishing he could say sorry to all the eunuchs he had thrashed. In 1967, the last emperor died aged sixty-one.

* Cixi had banned foot-binding in 1902, as had the new republic in 1912, and the practice was already declining. This time it was final.

* Stalin and Mao together received Ho Chi Minh in Moscow. Mao started to train and arm 70,000 Viet Minh fighters. Mao invited other Indo-Chinese Communists for training in Beijing: one was a Cambodian teacher, trained in Paris, called Saloth Sar, who later changed his name to Pol Pot.

* To celebrate the tricentenary of Hetman Khmelnytsky’s treaty of allegiance to the Romanov Tsar Alexei in April 1654, Stalin decided to grant Crimea to Ukraine. The new leaders made the transfer the next year. This meant that when in 1991, the Soviet Union broke up, Crimea remained part of Ukraine.