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“... Perplexing questions hung in the still air. Some hung there year after year: who killed the nurse Helen Smith? Some were of immediate import: where has the main post office gone this week? Some were insoluble, questions almost too puzzling to pose: where, oh where, is Idi Amin? The Uganda dictator, driven out by Tanzanian troops in 1979, had been offered ...”

“... immediately successive alliterating words: ‘I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-/dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn falcon.’ We’re also drawn into Ford’s poems by his conviction that his experience is no different from ours: ‘Our errands merely seem/ average and natural: every second is underwritten/by an invisible ...”

“... Greek leader Agamemnon had uttered very similar words when his brother Menelaus (for whose wife, Helen, the whole war is fought) was wounded: A day will come when sacred Ilion will perish, with Priam, lord of the fine ash spear, and Priam’s people; And Zeus, high-throned son of Kronos, the sky dweller, will, in fury at such deceit, shake his black-cloud ...”

“... Brendan King​ starts with a difficulty: Beryl Bainbridge’s writing. It makes everyone else’s prose look flabby. But he also has an advantage: his particular knowledge of her life. King worked with Bainbridge for more than twenty years. He looked after her admin and edited her last novel for publication after her death ...”

“... between Cubism and the Theory of Relativity. We know a great deal about Caravaggio’s Rome. Helen Langdon’s biography is especially rich in new research and she is as informative on the intellectual and cultural interests of Cardinal del Monte as on the notions of ‘honour’ that provoked thuggish street brawls; she explains how the households of ...”

“... the next time he happened to be in London. It’s the kind of invitation that might well appeal to Helen DeWitt, an ardent admirer of 18th-century wits and philosophers, and a classicist whose erudition undoubtedly extends to a familiarity with the defining features of Spartan rhetoric (Laconia is the region of the south-eastern Peloponnese which includes the ...”

“... At the treason trials, the law officers claimed that the LCS was leading a plot to depose the King and usurp the powers of government, but the juries rejected this claim each time it was put before them, no doubt because it relied on arguments about what would count as usurpation and deposition which were figurative and technical to the point of ...”

“... in this novel. The expatriate community in Rangoon decide to rename an island after the English king, in order to honour the royal birthday. An elaborate expedition sets sail. Once disembarked on the wild island, this patriotic picnic party starts to go badly awry. An undisciplined massacre of turtles, emerging from the sea to lay, is a dismaying omen. Much ...”

“... best-edited of novels. On page ten the lovers are discovered on a June afternoon: ‘the bed is king-sized, with a white padded headboard and matching white bedside cupboards.’ On page 14 it is the same afternoon, the bed is still king-size and the lovers are still in it: but the bedside tables are now mahogany and ...”

“... are bombarded not with useful news but with junk about how the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques (King Fahd) has received a message from the President of Djibouti. Realism is at a premium, and three months after the arrival of US troops King Fahd still talks about ‘Arab and friendly forces’ as if most of the soldiers ...”

“... prototype. While modern French scholarship busies itself with probing the dreams of the poem’s king in order to uncover a ‘feudal libido’, can we recapture the dreams that troubled the original Charlemagne (a light sleeper, as it happens)? Already in the Early Medieval period people were in the business of making images for themselves and investing ...”

“... not be expected to lie awake pondering the logical status of such propositions as ‘the present king of France is bald.’ Despite his dependence on women he accused the whole sex of ‘triviality of soul’. In his letters he spoke copiously and freely to a great many correspondents. It is hard to read the dozens of amorous effusions here quoted without ...”

“... come as no surprise, but you would probably not expect an Orestes to revolve around a plot to kill Helen of Troy, or a play called Helen to open in Egypt or an Iphigeneia in the Ukraine. And who could have anticipated that a Phoenician Women, for god’s sake, would conceal yet another play about incestuous Thebes, or that ...”

“... the death of Louis? Couldn’t he have intervened to arrest the chain of events that had led the king inexorably to the guillotine? In the summer of 1792, with the Austrian and Prussian armies massing on the borders of France, threatening to invade in order to restore Louis to all the ‘legitimate authority’ he had exercised before the Revolution, the ...”

“... a pair of genuinely nasty Furies, a clown, some melodious harvesters, and a strange talking head. Helen Cooper mentions Peele’s play glancingly on two occasions, describing it as ‘a compendium of everyone’s favourite motifs from popular romance and folk tale’. That implies a generic distinction between the two forms. But romance, whether popular or ...”