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“... William Rees-Mogg – do not wish to argue that the Americans or, say, the Swiss ought to have a king. And many would probably be embarrassed to have the Windsors bracketed with the House of Saud or the Sultan of Brunei – although these are the only two monarchies to compare with them in wealth: the Japanese royal family, though presiding over a far richer ...”

“... as they were when the phrase ‘jet set’ was first coined. Concorde was built to move Princess Margaret, Noël Coward, Grace Kelly and Ian Fleming around the world. It was built to carry them to Barbados for the winter, and to New York to go shopping; to Buenos Aires to watch the polo, and to South Africa to go on safari. Since this pattern of use for air ...”

“... kept alive until they’d given birth and the captors themselves sometimes kept the children. Margaret Atwood has said that her inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale was reading the news from Argentina.The Abuelas began as a group of fourteen women, and what was originally intended as a stationary protest turned into a march after military officials ...”

“... refugees who had settled in America almost unanimously rejected the revolution and fought for the king who had crushed them at Culloden. How was that possible? Some say that Jacobitism was always blindly authoritarian. Devine, on the other hand, suggests ‘rampant commercialism’ on the part of the clan chiefs, who simply harvested their dependants and sold ...”

“... call the company ‘fox’ for nothing.I liked Pollack. He had swag. He answered to the moniker ‘King P’ and looked the part of a Hollywood high-roller. (His big hit at the time was They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?; he went on to make Tootsie and Out of Africa, for which he won an Academy Award.) He pulled up for our first session at Mabery Road in a red ...”

“... breakthrough in 1979, a year of strikes, bombs, serial killers, high inflation and the election of Margaret Thatcher. The Russian invasion of Afghanistan felt like the beginning of the end of the world. As Savage says, ‘there was a sense – reinforced by the vacant, derelict inner cities – that the bomb had already dropped.’ We were nostalgic for the ...”

“... This, as he recognises, is a form of self-praise. Throughout, Patrick is both the ‘King of the World’ that he wants to be – Glasgow belongs to him – and an abject sinner. The rage of the novel’s males would be enough to put the wind up Margaret Thatcher if it weren’t so often the rage of those who ...”

“... safer with a fifty-year-old President. Other stock characters are borrowed from fiction, notably King Solomon’s Mines, which D.M. Thomas read with interest when he was a small boy in Australia. Like other boys, he wondered what sort of quarterdeck language Commander Good used when he was swearing at Zulus and whether he responded erotically to the devotion ...”

“... But the story of his life is no more than the nutshell in which he is bounded: within, he is still king of infinite space. One needs to know the story, to be sure: but it is the infinite space that counts. In the end, if one is to read about Stendhal, as one must, for curiosity about the man is a natural result of the magnetic attraction that draws one back to ...”

“... the modern world as being devoid of authority and over-supplied with electric power plants. The King of the land of Ho (the Confucian term for harmony) has lived to regret the ploughing-up of his truffle-forests and bogle-fens to make room for an enormous power-station. Another of Barthelme’s narrators looks on with unconcealed envy at two old ladies ...”

“... rental bungalows, a footnote in the biographies of T.E. Lawrence, Beaverbrook and Mackenzie King, and the villain in lachrymose ‘decline of Britain’ books and television series. I think by the end of the Seventies only the Hannay books and one or two others were still in print. The charges against John Buchan were either false (as with ...”

“... detective sergeant covering Soho. He becomes mixed up in complicated skulduggery involving a porn king and the bent superintendent who fitted him up and got him dismissed from the force. After a number of adventures with men, women and a seven-year-old boy (the only person Duffy can’t screw is his straight girlfriend), and after nearly having his penis ...”

“... a phase of ‘improving’ the imperfect Shakespeare, as for example in Nahum Tate’s version of King Lear, which allowed Cordelia not only to survive but to marry Edgar – a much more ‘satisfying’ result. And the 19th century produced one of my favourite ‘prequels’, Mary Cowden Clarke’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, which offered the ...”

“... to dare (for once) to imagine sympathetically. Reis’s conservatism and nostalgia for the exiled king, Dom Sebastião, is translated in the novel into sensitivity, and an acute awareness of everything that touches him. In 1998, Saramago wrote this: ‘In one sense it could even be said that, letter by letter, word by word, page by page, book after book, I ...”

“... process for handling federal clemency applications and, in the words of the American lawyer Margaret Colgate, ‘enjoyed a final unencumbered opportunity to reward friends, bless strangers and settle old scores’. On his last day in office, 20 January 2001, Clinton signed pardon warrants for 141 individuals and commuted the sentences of another ...”