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“... that tale is over and the Rev. Dr Rabelais thinks of real men in real wars, a ‘tyrant’ such as Charles V, who ransomed the King of France, is condemned and the once-comic figures who egged Picrochole on are treated as ‘seditious’ (a sin as well as a crime) and made to toil in the printing-presses; the wounded are ...”

“... on the railways. No, 350,000 German soldiers, said Colonel Driscoll DSO, working as moles. The King spoke of his nephew the Kaiser planning to land an army corps and proclaim that, as a grandson of Queen Victoria, he was ready to free the King from ‘the Socialistic gang which is ruining the country’; Parliament voted ...”

“... published in November 1790, before the September Massacres and the Terror and the execution of the king and queen. At that point, it was not only the radicals who were still exclaiming with Charles James Fox that the Revolution was the greatest and the best event that ever happened to the world. Pitt himself had declared a ...”

“... a brushed steel buckle. He’d met Charlie, but this was his first look at the truck. ‘Hello Charles,’ he said to Charlie, then remarked: ‘I like the shotgun rack.’ ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It’s also good for keeping umbrellas.’ He stared. ‘No, man. Umbrellas? What kind of wuss-ass keeps umbrellas in his shotgun rack?’ Before I could answer ...”

“... village schoolmaster, was no snob. But it seems that she did not really like cricket, or beer, or Charles Lamb, or – after a very brief marital idyll – Blunden himself. She declined to accompany him to Japan, for which he set out in 1924 to take up a teaching post at Tokyo University. Although his students soon began to like and appreciate him, he was ...”

“... as of zealous anti-court satirists. What are we to make of all those Restoration tributes to Charles II’s saucy prick, Rachel Weil asks in an essay called ‘Sometimes a Sceptre is only a Sceptre’? Do they represent an attack on a monarch who has bankrupted the nation in his relentless pursuit of cunt? Why art thou poor, O ...”

“... crossed Newfoundland, 33 hours before he landed in Paris. The French President decorated him; King George V received him at Buckingham Palace; President Coolidge sent a cruiser and an admiral to bring him home. In Chesapeake Bay, Mr Kennedy tells us, the cruiser was met by four destroyers, two army dirigibles and a fly-past from all three services. Ashore ...”

“... to observe the daily workings of these diminutive species. He was also a friend and neighbour of Charles Darwin. He provided the land on which Darwin constructed the Sand Walk at Down, where he pondered the problems of organic evolution as he took his daily stroll. Lubbock was the type example (as an entomologist might say) of the preternaturally energetic ...”

“... managed to celebrate it as a ‘triumph for gay rights’ – in the Windsor Guildhall, where Charles had married Camilla only eight months before. Having arrived in the same year as the Civil Partnership Register, Matt Houlbrook’s impressive study of queer life in London between 1918 and 1957 does much to revise our understanding of homosexuality in ...”

“... and pavement script. The church’s columns were chalked with words too, and the Word of God – a King James Bible, ‘User’s Guide on Back’ – appeared to float unabashed on a sea of London scrawls. For a few days after the explosions, the atmosphere was bad on the buses. Passengers were looking into every face as they sat on a Number 30 from ...”

“... Faced with the elaborate charges that were fast piling up against her, Rudd was quick to turn King’s evidence against the Perreaus in the hope of avoiding prosecution. If this twist was predictable, the next one was not. In an unprecedented and controversial step, the judges in the brothers’ trial decided to strip Rudd of her protection as a Crown ...”

“... Camp David, where she intended to remind Reagan of some hard political truths. Her principal aide, Charles Powell, drafted a memo in which he laid bare the core of the argument she would need to get across to the president (the emphasis comes from Thatcher’s annotations of the text): You will cause me very real political difficulties if you pursue your ...”

“... of The Huntsman. According to Gaston Phoebus’s 14th-century Livre de chasse, the hare is ‘king of all venery’. Turner drew and painted several hare chases apart from Rain, Steam and Speed. In one of them, a hare runs over the spot where Harold was felled at the Battle of Hastings. In Apollo and Daphne (c.1837), Daphne prevents Apollo from helping a ...”

“... Moreover, the wandering apprentices of Central Europe and the great military leaders like Charles VIII of France had one thing in common: they saw the world and came home with a great desire to enjoy new comforts and practise new skills. In material as in high culture, some local traditions resisted while others yielded, and still others were merged ...”

“... Analects, ‘it benefits all things and does not compete with them.’ Merlin turns the future king into a fish as part of his education in T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, and as a fish ‘he could do what men always wanted to do, that is fly. There is practically no difference between flying in water and flying in the air … It was like the dreams ...”