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“... orchestra pit as it were, not as it was revealed to the audience when the fire curtain went up. Prince Alexander Schervashidze, Diaghilev’s scene painter, who made this enlarged version from Picasso’s little panel, did the job in less than 24 hours, and did it well. You can tell because there is a replica of Picasso’s picture nearby. (Today it would ...”

“... have to a dominant face-painter of Reynolds’s calibre) paints the Queen (as Reynolds painted the Prince of Wales) or Kate Moss undressed (as Reynolds painted Kitty Fisher), it is not the power of his canvases to match the glamour evoked by the written and spoken word which first strikes us, but their resemblance or lack of it to photographs – very often to ...”

“... darker and less furiously though still adequately inventive. Its economy may shock some folk, for Peter Carey is known to be an exuberant novelist, copious, various and fantastic. It is possible to admire his books for their lack of respect for boundaries, for the qualities they share with the work of modern Latin American novelists. However, they are always ...”

“... In​ 1811, at the age of 26, Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau inherited the estate of Muskau (nearly 200 square miles in size, annexed to Saxony in 1806 but allotted to Prussia by the Congress of Vienna and partly absorbed by Poland in the 20th century), together with the smaller estate of Branitz. He was determined not only to carry out improvements but to create a landscape park on the English model ...”

“... At the age​ of 23 Prince Charles embarked with no great enthusiasm on a six-week training course at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. The course had been reduced from the usual three months for him, but it was long enough for Charles to realise that seafaring was yet another area in which he and his father had nothing in common ...”

“... have the power to block appointments.Cameron schmoozed for his money. He had tea with Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in Saudi Arabia and reportedly brokered a meeting between Greensill and Barack Obama. But his main job seems to have been making representations to his former colleagues. In April 2020, as the pandemic took hold, Cameron pressed the ...”

“... What was Racine’s strategy here? It is perhaps a pity that Marin did not follow the lead of Peter France and discuss the tension in Racine (or Boileau) between loyalty and independence, the strategies of criticism or self-defence as well as the strategies of praise. Such an approach would free him from the danger of reductionism. There remains the ...”

“... there seemed to be upwards of five thousand persons – ‘the size of the Jacobite army under Prince Charles Edward Stuart’, noted the Scotsman’s reporter – assembled on the tableland for the 250th birthday. Around 10 a.m. the queue of motor carriages stretched back down into Inverness. After a dry winter the sombre morass was a lot more walkable ...”

“... his extensive property portfolio, his playboy lifestyle, his motley collection of friends (Peter Mandelson, Nat Rothschild, Prince Andrew), his ready access to Libya’s sovereign wealth fund, and his recently professed willingness to eliminate the enemies of his father’s regime one bullet at a time? He’s a ...”

“... they stand. Their nation, of whose actuality they seem to possess only the frailest knowledge: Prince Charles, already well into middle age, was surprised to learn from a bibliomane that Charing Cross Road had once been the centre of the London book trade. He is constantly bemused by farmers using pesticides.What they do feel they know is that their ...”

“... It was in 1982 that the artist then still known as Prince first invited us to ‘party like it’s 1999’, and in those days everyone quickly grasped what he meant. The Cold War made people edgy (‘Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb?’) and it seemed quite possible that we might wake up one morning and find that we were ‘out of time ...”

“... indefatigably stimulating collection are, in the end, the biographical essays, whether of royalty (Prince Albert, the Duke of Windsor, Mountbatten), or artists (Lutyens, Elgar), or politicians (Neville Chamberlain, Eden). These are brief lives which, in each case, reflect the play of an incisive and acute mind upon a substantial biography: pulling out the ...”

“... or educational, most grown-ups make only occasional nostalgic excursions into the country of Peter Rabbit, and then only as part of the ritual induction of their children into reading. In contrast, the young have always been efficient rievers of stories from all sources, and have carried off such literary booty as pleased them. Now that children have ...”

“... in Shakespeare’s text as well as in Elizabethan England, a male-dominated society whose prince was a woman, to conclude that the play ‘creates the culture by which it is created, shapes the fantasies by which it is shaped, begets that by which it is begotten’. Mullaney does not discuss Amazons but he has a good deal to say about Brazil, or more ...”

“... dialogue of Plato’s entitled The Symposium, praises his master Socrates, beyond all doubt the prince of philosophers, he compares him, amongst other things, to a Silenus. Now a Silenus, in ancient days, was a little box, of the kind we see today in apothecaries’ shops, painted on the outside with such gay, comical figures as harpies, satyrs, bridled ...”