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“... in which family alliances would be less important, and the Annual Register rejoiced that the young King had ‘united all sects and all parties’. For the time being, however, the old ways prevailed and Burke had to do the best he could. He agreed to act as paid assistant and adviser to William Gerard Hamilton, chief secretary of the Lord Lieutenant of ...”

“... ken the man weel: he’s one of my thirty pound knights’ – which hit too obviously at King James’s sale of honours. Punishment for this sort of thing was no joke. When the authors were arrested, ‘the report was that they should then have their ears cut, and noses.’ Confrontation was Jonson’s mode as a man and a writer. He was a ...”

“... Israel, he said, would be a last resort. Kissinger snubbed him. He also ignored those, including King Hussein of Jordan, who warned that an Arab offensive to recover the territories lost in 1967 might be imminent. And he dismissed the CIA’s predictions of an Arab oil embargo against the US in the event of war.Early on the morning of 6 October 1973, the ...”

“... Alexandria, Smyrna, Constantinople and Beirut. More Greeks lived under the sultan than under King Otto, and the Ottoman ports prospered. But eventually every important Levantine port would meet the fate of Chios. Smyrna too was destroyed by the Turks; Alexandria was abandoned; Beirut – the last Levantine city to ascend and plummet – destroyed ...”

“... commandos who had made Beirut their headquarters following their expulsion from Jordan by King Hussein after the Black September fighting of 1970. Miss Universe 1971 was a Lebanese Christian ingenue, Georgina Rizk, who brought some bikini glamour to progressive politics by marrying Ali Hassan Salameh, the PLO’s security chief. Throw in the spies and ...”

“... limitation of Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy is its concentration on Florence. Charles Mack’s magnificently-illustrated volume comes as a welcome reminder of the importance of other parts of Tuscany, as well as a spectacular example of what could be done by a patron who was in a position, unlike the patricians of Florence, to display his ...”

“... on to Malta and then to England, where she arrived in June 1827 and was taken to Windsor. The king had her fed on a supposedly nourishing diet of milk, ordered a warm and commodious stable to be constructed for her comfort, and commissioned portraits of her from three painters. But she didn’t thrive. Her head began to droop and physicians were ...”

“... Cowper came to me and said: “O that I were insane always. I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane? … You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us all – mad as a refuge from unbelief – Bacon, Newton and Locke.’ ” Thus William Blake’s memo of a ghostly visitation from William Cowper. But how aghast Cowper would have been at the words put into his mouth! Blake revelled in his own prophetic ravings, soaring free from the mind-forged manacles of the rationalist trinity into the aether of mysticism and insight ...”

“... The Tory donor Christopher Moran, at 259, who only has £620 million, £20 million more than King Charles, is the owner of the Chelsea Cloisters, better known as ‘ten floors of whores’.Whether you’re a steel magnate or a lottery winner, you want to be bigger than the guy next door, and that kind of culture, though not new to Britain, had never ...”

“... to Rupert Murdoch’s Times, Worsthorne’s first reaction was that it was like choosing to be King of Ruritania instead of King of England. But Sir Perry has built his career on telling us that the country is going to the dogs. So after mature consideration, he began to feel that Mr Dacre’s choice wasn’t just a ...”

“... In 1629, King Charles I granted the Massachusetts Bay Company a standard commercial charter containing a clerical slip that changed the world. The document charged the stockholders with duly electing a board of management – a governor and 18 assistants – and holding them to account at quarterly meetings. However, crown officials failed to specify where the company headquarters should be (London would have been the usual assumption) and the wily leaders of the company absconded to New England, where they transformed quarterly meetings into government sessions, stockholders into freemen, assistants into magistrates, the governor into a Governor, and then piously declared their new regime to be ‘a city on a hill’ ready to serve as a model of divinely inspired governance for the rest of the world (well, for England, which came to the same thing ...”

“... Mona Lisa Overdrive; for the classic citations in Cole Porter’s ‘You’re the Top’, Nat ‘King’ Cole’s ‘Mona Lisa’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘Visions of Johanna’; for the spliff-smoking poster and the novelty mouse-pad. Personally I suspect that I first became aware of the Mona Lisa through the Jimmy Clanton hit of c.1960, which began: ‘She’s ...”

“... In the​ First Book of Kings (5:1-5) Hiram, King of Tyre, sends servants to Solomon, ‘for he had heard, that they had anointed him king in the room of his father,’ David: For Hiram was ever a lover of David. And Solomon sent to Hiram, saying: thou knowest how that David my father could not build an house unto the name of the Lord his God, for the wars which were about him on every side, until the Lord put them under the soles of his feet ...”

“... Eliot was firing off letter after letter dotted with doggerel detailing the sex-capades of ‘King Bolo and his Big Black Kween’, while producing poem after poem whose energies derive not just from the distancing irony but also from the unexamined ambiguity of their author’s feelings towards the social and sexual problems incarnated in the ...”