The times: world news

Napoleon III, a nephew of Bonaparte, became France’s first president in 1848. But eight years earlier, as Louis-Napoleon, he had been hauled before Bow Street magistrates for duelling on Wimbledon Common. His opponent was his cousin Count Léon, Bonaparte’s illegitimate son.

A new book on the often-scandalous lives of the Bonapartes has revealed details of the episode that nearly led to the death on English soil of one of France’s most noted leaders. The British Bonapartes, by Edward Hilary Davis, describes how, while Louis-Napoleon was living in London after a failed coup attempt in France, he was involved in the duel that was cut short owing to a squabble over the weapon...

The rights to a cookbook that once stood on bookshelves in half the households of Vienna have been returned to its owners, more than 80 years after it was stolen by the Nazis.

Written in 1935 by Alice Urbach, a Jewish resident of Vienna, the best- selling So kocht man in Wien! (How to cook in Vienna!), containing 500 pages of recipes including boiled beef, Wiener schnitzel, apricot dumplings and pastries, was swiped following the Nazi’s 1938 annexation of Austria.

As Urbach fled to Britain, her publishers, Ernst Reinhardt of Munich, bowed to the orders of the Nazis, who claimed the cookbook and two others she had written for themselves by “Aryanising” and republishing it under the name of Rudolf Rösch, whose existence has never been proven...