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“... stood, queens, princes, heathen courtiers, and in some dark pocket at the outer edge the future king of England lowered his eyes to shake the hand of Robert Mugabe. We live in cultish times – not to say, occultist ones – in which it seems not unreasonable for people, en masse, to weep in the streets for public figures they previously cared little ...”

“... and employment. His trip to Rome was ‘not a tourist trip, but a political trip on behalf of the king’: he was angling for an ambassadorship, which he never received. Instead he was appointed mayor of Bordeaux, a ‘political compromise that was made at his expense’. His mayoral term was not a success; caught between irreconcilable pressure groups, he ...”

“... Hitler’s weren’t awkward enough, the script of Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film had to cut the king’s threats to allow his troops to rape and pillage at Harfleur, his orders for the killing of prisoners of war at Agincourt, and the Chorus’s parting admission that Henry’s short-lived territorial gains proved futile, with his reign being followed by ...”

“... Corbin situates the Giants’ Causeway in Wales, quotes a remark supposed to have been made by Francis Bacon years after he was dead, and claims that King Lear tried to throw himself off the cliff at Dover. Such are the problems that arise in work of broader scope; the smells, good and bad, of the earlier book are mostly ...”

“... shrivelling scrivener Bartleby in the bureaucratic aftermath of the Jacksonian Revolution, or by Francis Coppola’s fratricidal Michael Corleone in the Cold War utopia of the Fifties, or by The Turner Diaries’ stone-faced Timothy McVeigh in 1995, just months after the United States began a shift from the republic of inclusion shaped by ...”

“... posture. In Red Dragon, things naturally go wrong for Will Graham. He does catch the bad guy, one Francis Dolarhyde, who turns out to be the employee of a film-processing company: Graham twigs that he had developed film of both the families he had attacked. (Dolarhyde suffered from a cleft palate as a child; Harris is heroically un-PC about giving his baddies ...”

“... as ‘philandering’ the latter down the Wye. Lady Oxford already had a liaison with Sir Francis Burdett, as she was later to have with Byron, and the paternity of her children was considered so doubtful that they became known as the Harleian Miscellany. Lady Holland wondered if the blame for Lady Oxford’s promiscuity should be traced back to ...”

“... sort of people’ in the 17th century. It was his Marxist materialism that enabled Francis Klingender to write what still remains a classic of art history: Art and the Industrial Revolution (1947). But until recently Marxist historians have hardly illuminated the workings of the state. This is partly because they have rightly been indignant ...”

“... witnessed a slow leaching of life away from those parts of Catholic devotional practice that the king had allowed to remain after the dissolution of the monasteries. Edward VI presided enthusiastically over a wholesale assault on this Catholic tradition which, if he had not died in his teens, would probably have eliminated all church organs and any ...”

“... is one of the duties of men of independent fortunes to serve in Parliament if called upon.’ Sir Francis Wood paid £4000 for a seat at Grimsby for his son Charles, since he had ‘not the slightest doubt of his … attending consistently and unremittingly to his duties’. Some were more assiduous than others. Joseph Hume, MP first for Aberdeen then for ...”

“... convention that can be irritating when it is clear that a perfectly ordinary individual, not a king or even a newspaper, is speaking. American reviewers had a good model in Edmund Wilson’s unaffected prose. The tone of English criticism varied from Ezra Pound’s egotistical shouting to the confident elegance of the Sunday paper reviewers, and, in ...”

“... fitting.’ A ready-made Pop Art collage, it consecrated absolute celebrity, the President and the King. The presidency, Norman Mailer observed during Nixon’s 1972 bid for re-election, is ‘a primitive office and inspires the tribes of America to pick up the modes and manners of their chief’. Two genres that thrived under the Nixon presidency were the ...”

“... inhabitants of that same country, and not only in England. Across the Channel they wondered why a king should choose to marry his mistress. (The whole point is, however, that Anne never was Henry’s mistress, whereas her sister Mary was. When Henry was accused of having slept not only with Anne’s sister but with her mother, he disarmingly ...”

“... to the city. There he was determined above all to visit the house in which the ambassador of the King of Persia lived. He had the vague hope that he might somehow find a clue there.’ This is typical in its over-emphasis. It’s a perfectly ordinary moment in the story, which needs one or two functional sentences, not ‘above ...”

“... British Isles at any date. A late and sadly unreliable anecdote conveys something of his style. Francis Kynaston reported in the early 17th century that when Henryson was dying of diarrhoea (probably around 1500) a cunning woman told him to go and circle a rowan tree chanting ‘whikey tree, whikey tree, take away this flux from me.’ Henryson is reported ...”