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“... had allowed his mind a frivolous diversion on the way to the Heights. Homer of course was the king of the classics. ‘Homer is a god, not a man’: the schoolboy who copied this out knew his curriculum. Homer rules, and because his language had been archaic since the fifth century bc, he was served by a whole household of ...”

“... who is gathered here? The old man playing cards is Don Luis de Borbón, the younger brother of King Charles III of Spain, the woman having her hair done is María Teresa de Vallabriga y Rozas, the bride he chose from among three proposed by his brother when his (Don Luis’s) philandering became too scandalous to bear. When the picture was painted he was ...”

“... who rules in their native Thebes; in the battle, the brothers kill one another; Creon, the next king, orders that Eteocles be buried as a hero, Polynices left unburied as a traitor; Antigone, the sister of the dead men, defies the order and symbolically buries Polynices; Creon condemns her to an underground prison; there she hangs herself, and Creon’s son ...”

“... of the Russian Empire that had recently become the centre of the world oil industry. ‘If oil is king, Baku is its throne,’ he wrote in Baku: An Eventful History. But the Russian industry was even then beginning a precipitous decline following a series of crippling strikes in the oilfields led by a young Joseph Stalin, and rebellion was spreading across ...”

“... monarchy declined (despite his efforts, or even because of them), while France rose. The ‘planet king’, Philip IV, was eclipsed by the sun of Louis XIV. History, or the historian at any rate, has little patience with failure. The second reason for the neglect of Olivares is the loss of most of his papers, those notorious papers which he took everywhere ...”

“... of treasons drawn up in 1351, it was an offence to ‘compass or imagine the death of our lord the king’. The meaning of these strange words was already archaic in the early 1790s when William Pitt’s Government brought an array of British radical reformers to trial for high treason. The words ‘compass’ and ‘imagine’ had entered the English language ...”

“... Why are we being compelled to think about how male pianists speak? King Vidor’s A Song to Remember (1945) exerted no such pressure. Nor did Max Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948). Yet, while Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) presented a woman incapable of speech, François Girard’s Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould (1994) presented a man who was abnormally articulate – one who in the 22nd film, for example, rehearses the revealing personal ad: ‘Friendly, companionably reclusive, socially unacceptable, alcoholically abstemious, tirelessly talkative, zealously unzealous, spiritually intense, minimally turquoise, maximally ecstatic loon seeks moth or moths with similar equalities for purposes of telephonic seduction, Tristan-esque trip-taking ...”

“... with other versions of that photograph and with black and white line drawings – acorns, a pearly king and queen, a pub table, a crown – that are a convincing imitation of the style of Edward Bawden’s linocuts. His other contribution, a more than life-size bronze skull, Head of a Fallen Giant, at first glance an exotic nail-studded fetish, turns out to be ...”

“... bottom of a young lady, glossy as a well-groomed pony’s rump, is put beside Jordaen’s King Candaules of Lydia Showing His Wife to Gyges, which is dominated by the Queen’s broad naked back and buttocks. The exposed upper chest and widely separated breasts of Raeburn’s Mrs Scott Moncrieff are set beside Etty’s Venus, who still seems to be ...”

“... and ‘Independent’ in the old carefree way. Three years later followed The Reign of King Pym, a masterly study of Parliamentary politics during the early years of the English Revolution which has dominated historical thinking ever since. In 1952, he published More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea, a competent but not epoch-making work. Since ...”

“... exile. But the most noted instance of the prophet rejecting his own country is the director Peter Brook who, having forged a glittering career in the British theatre, from a consummate King Lear to a definitive Midsummer Night’s Dream, decided to up sticks and set up an international company of actors abroad. ...”

“... elegy, always more concerned with poses than postures, confined itself to metaphor. (Even Ovid. Peter Green’s new version, recommended for its lively and understanding commentary, coarsens the language of the text, as it coarsens style and fabric; Poundian huff-and-puff blows elegance out of the window.) In oratory, statesman charges statesman with the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... this point from a case strangely omitted from Mme Badinter’s text: the case of Dr Truby King and his supersession by Dr Spock. Truby King, with his insistence on regular routines for babies and on never picking them up until the appointed time for nursing, was indisputably dominant in the English-speaking world ...”

“... off the side of a cliff,’ one of his advisers said in an interview with the New York Times. Peter King, a former Republican congressman from Long Island who cosied up to Trump, said that he ‘should no longer be the face of the Republican Party’, adding that the party ‘can’t become a personality cult’. But it already is a personality ...”