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“... with glowering skies. ‘You seem to have had very bad luck with your weather, Mr Piper,’ the king is said to have commented when he saw them. It isn’t immediately obvious how in the space of five years an artist could have come to be both a pioneer of international modernism in Britain and a dainty recorder of English country houses. In the mid-1930s ...”

“... growing up. Virginie Despentes was born in 1969 and grew up in Nancy, in north-east France. In King Kong Theory, a short half-memoir half-essay published in France in 2006, she writes that when she was 15 she was briefly sectioned in a psychiatric institution, and at 17 left Nancy for Lyon, never to return. As a teenager, her passion in life was following ...”

“... first half of their first volume of A Social History of British Broadcasting Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff seem scarcely to try. As they tread the well-worn path through the BBC’s approaches – first as a company, then as a corporation – to politics and international affairs and the General Strike and the Abdication crisis and all the other familiar ...”

“... bread, till thou return unto the ground.’ The New English Bible translates as ‘labour’ what King James’s scholars called ‘sorrow’ – ‘Accursed shall be the ground on your account. With labour you shall win your food from it.’ A few pages later comes the very odd passage in which Noah’s son Ham sees him naked when drunk. Awakening from his ...”

“... Sonnets. The court advised Bampfylde ‘in the mean time to be upon his good behaviour’ to the King, ‘and all his Subjects, especially towards the said Sr Joshua Reynolds’. One is left wondering how successfully Bampfylde maintained ‘good behaviour’ in the weeks that followed. There is no reference in the Public Advertiser’s report to the ...”

“... out of line. Enter Muhammad Ali, who over the next few years was to change the face of boxing. David Remnick’s book in fact concentrates on the two astonishing fights Ali had with Liston (Ali won the title in the first and defended it successfully in the second), and on the relationship between Ali, Liston and Patterson. For Remnick, as for most ...”

“... is obsessively riding the New York subway when we first hear it. ‘There’s more to it,’ David Ferrie says in the same novel. ‘There’s always more to it. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.’ Surface and secret: even when people dispute the details, the names and the numbers, they ...”

“... last, Fait et à faire, last February. This was soon followed by The Castoriadis Reader, edited by David Ames Curtis, Castoriadis’s major expositor in the English-speaking world: a festschrift edited by Curtis appeared last May as an issue of the journal, Thesis Eleven, which has been a major platform for Castoriadis’s ideas. In later life, Castoriadis ...”

“... This was Coleridge’s harmless bird ‘that loved the man who shot him’; Baudelaire’s ‘king of the blue’ brought ‘stumbling and ashamed’ into the orbit of men.You could make a research appointment, I discovered, at UCL’s Grant Museum of Zoology, and the albatross would be taken out of the cabinet so you could see it up close. ‘As we are ...”

“... contemporary power with glamour and authority. Among the incisively captioned illustrations is David Wilkie’s painting of George IV in Highland dress – the outfit he wore for his entry into Edinburgh in 1822 (an event that was stage-managed by Scott) – opposite the playbill for a production in 1823 of Shakespeare’s ...”

“... for help she was told ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945.’ In fact, as David Olusoga’s remarkable book shows, people racialised as black have been in Britain for more than two thousand years. During the third century, North African Roman soldiers formed part of the occupation of the British Isles: ‘Aurelian Moors’ were ...”

“... were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life out of the story of this king.’ To the 17th-century republicans Edmund Ludlow and Algernon Sidney, Henry would be ‘that monster of mankind’, ‘one of the most violent princes we ever had’. To Bolingbroke in the 18th century, Henry’s would appear the most ‘severe’ of ...”

“... and even transvests Charles I into a baroque Margaret Thatcher, closing seven hundred pages on the King with the words: ‘He believed some principles worth adhering to whatever the repercussions – and well, he may even have been right.’ Russell will compare Ship Money to the Poll Tax, and describe the arrival of James I in London as a foretaste of the ...”

“... reminder that the RSC’s standards have always been based on a close study of the words. David Suchet convincingly shows that his human rather than fishy, black but not monstrous Caliban was a perfectly logical reading, in defiance of grand and inhuman Calibans stretching back to Beerbohm Tree, who, taking his name too literally perhaps, regressed ...”

“... most powerful man in the country. Judgments on him tended to be harsh. One British agent, Colonel David Smiley, wrote that Shehu ‘boasted’ of having personally slit the throats of 70 Italian prisoners during the war. Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that Tito had told him that Shehu had strangled his predecessor as Minister of the Interior, Koci ...”