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“... the height of the Muppets’ fame, the frame of reference is impressive: Miss Piggy as Fay Wray in King Kong, Miss Piggy as the Forces’ sweetheart and, brilliantly, Miss Piggy as Annie Hall, with Kermit as Woody. The calendar idea led to books, including Miss Piggy’s Art Masterpieces from the Kermitage Collection, in which Miss Piggy modelled for ...”

“... scribble across the simple mystery of Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. Vermeer is the reverse of a king; his art the very opposite of Lowell’s credo that ‘the artist’s existence becomes his art.’ Vermeer’s pictures are endlessly mysterious and commonplace precisely because the artist is not in them, has been able so completely to exclude himself. And ...”

“... You will eat ‘like a prince or princess’, or, raising the social stakes, ‘like a king or queen’. On the cover of the British edition of the New Diet Revolution, Nigella Lawson endorses Atkins as ‘the perfect diet for those who love food’. As an Atkins dieter, you will ‘eat as much as you want, as often as you want’; you will eat ...”

“... Piedmontese. Maximilian was so depressed he dreamed of becoming Belgian, like his father-in-law, King Leopold. A Saxe-Coburg princeling whose first wife had died in childbirth before she could inherit the British throne, Leopold had been installed as king of the new Belgian state created by the 1830 revolutions. Having ...”

“... I meditate; I raise The fallen emperor a shrine; I praise Liberty for its fruits, the crown and king For its due honour and its suffering – True to my parents’ blood in every way, He from the army, she from the Vendée. Hugo rhymes his birth with the moment Bonaparte becomes Napoleon. In Choses vues, a posthumous four-volume prose miscellany, he ...”

“... by a statement of intent. The essays concentrate on Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, King Lear and The Tempest. Greenblatt’s method is to juxtapose famous ‘literary’ texts with lesser-known, ‘non-literary’ texts, such as Jacques Duval’s Des Hermaphrodits (1603), Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (also ...”

“... Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend (David Shipman), Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (Steven Bach), or biographies of the Kennedys. It is characteristic of many such books that they begin far back, with early antecedents, and in the case of Seabiscuit there are many to account for, from Charles Howard’s scapegrace Canadian father who became ...”

“... of shifting populations, constantly moving to fit the categories that the living impose on it. Steven Katz has set out to secure the boundaries of one contested area by proving that the Jews killed by the Nazis are the sole rightful inhabitants of the territory defined by the concept ‘victims of genocide’: ‘The Holocaust is phenomenologically unique ...”

“... sanctions of enforced forgetfulness. That, at any rate, is the notion that drives the argument of Steven Mullaney’s new book. The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare begins in the prescribed New Historicist fashion, with a telling anecdote: During the night of 10 April 1549, a procession of carts rumbled through the streets of London on a ...”

“... were redefined and renamed, the names of the days and the months were changed, while the King of France was first renamed ‘the King of the French’ and finally ‘Citizen Capet’. It was a literary event in another sense, too. Controversialists on every side tried self-consciously to attain a rhetorical pitch ...”

“... to make their employees conform to their technology rather than the other way around. Insta-Burger King, later to become Burger King, used to have machines which made milkshakes and burgers automatically. Prospective franchisees were told: ‘Both machines have been thoroughly perfected … are of foolproof design – can be ...”

“... cracked, ‘I have nothing to conceal from you.’ On his return to London, Churchill told the king of his success with Roosevelt: we are ‘now married’. (Marriage notwithstanding, Farmelo says that days after Churchill left Washington, Roosevelt decided to go ahead with the Manhattan Project without telling him.) In his second term, Churchill tried ...”

“... would have it, recently been withdrawn by its second publishers: written by an American lawyer, Steven Martindale, and appropriately entitled By Hook or by Crook, it is said to be not without unconscious humour. But for a period, anyway, there was little inclination on Lonrho’s part to question the guru’s credentials; and, for twelve months or more ...”

“... VIII’s break with Rome was an unmitigated disaster. The dissolution of the religious houses, Steven Brindle writes, ‘tore the heart out of the patronage of … the arts’ as it had existed for nine centuries and brought about ‘the largest redistribution of land since the Norman Conquest’. It would take three generations to begin to recover from ...”

“... a novel at all – more in the line of a ‘novelisation’ (Newsweek again) of the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s colossally successful film. Michelangelo’s renowned image of God making finger contact with Adam (known to viewers of London Weekend Television through the surrogate emblem of Melvyn Bragg conducting the live electricity of the Arts) has ...”