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“... proving himself a cunning ‘politician’ in the precise pejorative sense used by Shakespeare in King Lear: ‘Get thee glass eyes,/And, like a scurvy politician, seem/To see the things thou dost not.’ So while the message of these texts is clear enough, their provenance makes them hard to interpret. The proportion of truth and invention in them cannot be ...”

“... of the tribal chiefs who have been meeting Chalabi once entertained the British, the Iraqi King and the Baathists. Their loyalty, by tradition and political necessity, is to power. That night, sitting outside in the darkness of the FIF’s desolate base, we watched flares light up the horizon. One bright flame after another shot up and floated down on ...”

“... Max Brod on Lake Garda. Brod thought d’Annunzio a superman – they treated him ‘like a second king of Italy’, he writes – but Kafka had a more laconic view. He looked small and ‘weak’, he thought, ‘skipping’ among the ladies and ‘shyly’ trotting around after Count Oldofredi, one of the show’s organisers. It was here that d’Annunzio ...”

“... in the village of Simel. The bloodshed in Mosul destroyed the belief of Iraq’s first monarch, King Feisal I, in the country that Britain had assigned him to govern: ‘There is still – and I say this with a heart full of sorrow – no Iraqi people but an unimaginable mass of human beings, devoid of any patriotic idea, imbued with religious traditions ...”

“... For sure circa Regna tonat. This comes as close as it was possible to get to criticism of a king who interpreted criticism as treason and who medicated treason with murder. ‘Wyt,’ the poem mourns, ‘helpythe not’ in demonstrating innocence. It is a punning lament, for neither wit nor Wyatt himself can change the mind of Henry VIII. ‘My head ...”

“... bringing to mind Max Miller’s celebrated appearance with a couple of potatoes – ‘King Edwards!’ – at the Royal Command Variety Performance. The potato became with great speed a staple food throughout Europe. It was greeted with especial enthusiasm in Ireland, where the moist climate is largely unsuited to the growing of wheat, and the ...”

“... progress of the Vikings from raiders to settlers to would-be conquerors: an attempted invasion by King Sweyn of Denmark three years later was abortive, and though Norwegians continued for many years to control the Scottish islands in the far North, their effect on the British mainland was negligible.But if you take a more romantic view, the First Viking Age ...”

“... who is the subject of Jonathan Scott’s biographical study, sought to incite insurrection against Charles II, and invoked the rights of ‘the nobility and people’, he made plain his assumption that the people would naturally do what the nobility told them. The assumption may surprise those historians who describe 17th-century England as a country ridden ...”

“... basic scenario’? Many onlookers have asked the question, most notable among them the sociologist Charles Tilly who, in The Contentious French (1986), engaged with a much broader swathe of French violence, from food riots to civil wars, and offered a nuanced sociological explanation. Burton, by focusing more narrowly on ‘expiatory’ violence, with its ...”

“... White-collar felonies were supplemented by what might be called dinner-jacket offences. Sir Charles Dilke was undone by the mendacious accusations of Virginia Crawford, and Parnell by his liaison with Kitty O’Shea. And then there was the Marlborough House set. It says something for the atmosphere of those years that among Lewis’s clients were some ...”

“... Oliver Cromwell and organised in Parliament, aroused the English proletariat to make war against Charles I, the High Church and the aristocracy. Having vanquished them, Cromwell then turned against his erstwhile class ally, the many-headed multitude, which during the course of the struggle against the King had developed a ...”

“... by Marx and Freud. These towering influences, together with Vilfredo Pareto, Graham Wallas and Charles Beard, all served to undermine his faith in reason, and led him to search for deeper drives which underlay the rationalisations of doctrine. He was surely right to mistrust pure reason and be aware of the impure motives which gave it such potency: but was ...”

“... Lilly deftly connects the heavenly cataclysms with those below: ‘I say this Conjunction findeth [King Charles] engaged in an uncivill and unnaturall War against his own Subjects, the English Nation.’ In all this, as it turned out, Lilly was correct. These events were both unprecedented and unnatural in contemporary terms; they escalated into a final ...”

“... who is ideally placed to traffic between the land of her birth and her adopted homeland, the way Charles Simic has done since the 1960s with Serbia (see his anthology of Serbian poetry, The Horse Has Six Legs, and his numerous single volumes of Lalic, Tadic, Ristovic, Salamun and many more). I wish her patience, talented originals, and many ...”

“... of common pleas. In 1613, at Bacon’s urging, James moved him, against his will, to the court of King’s Bench. Although Coke was called lord chief justice, the post carried no peerage and he was never ennobled. This enabled him, when the king finally dismissed him from judicial office in 1616, to return to the Commons as ...”