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“... idling. Like the new movie itself, we have our memories, and Tobey Maguire is still with us as Peter Parker, the goofiness wearing a little thin, but the earnestness holding up (in Spider-Man 2 the woman Peter loves appears in a Broadway production of The Importance of Being Earnest), and he does something very few ...”

“... One day in 1950 I walked down Crown Passage, an alley between King Street and Pall Mall, to call on the Falcon Press in pursuit of money they owed me. The managing director Peter Baker had left letters unanswered and telephone calls unreturned, and sure enough he was out. I saw instead a harassed long-nosed man in a blue suit who said his name was Paul Scott, and that he was the company secretary ...”

“... labour which must have gone into scattering tiny bees and flowers over the christening robe of the King of Rome in 1811. Shouldn’t the seamstresses have been doing something simpler for their own offspring? Wet nursing, which grates more strongly (and more rationally) with our idea of how mother and child should spend the early years, began as a farming-out ...”

“... and then a member of the Royal Academy while very young; he was knighted and made a painter to the King. He was well-rewarded as a portraitist. Personally he was unprepossessing. This Self-Portrait (1813) sent to his brother in India shows a contained, serious concentration which fits with accounts of an outwardly shy man, who liked better to stand by than to ...”

“... to bring them back into fashion. The five complete survivors, and their Latin cousin, Apollonius King of Tyre, paint with the same brush; their colourful conventions are thrown into relief by the two Roman geniuses who parody and transcend them, Petronius and Apuleius. (New translations of the whole Greek corpus now come in a bumper volume, Collected Ancient ...”

“... could be turned in his clay to the bung in a wine barrel. It is a trope that recurs repeatedly in Peter Redgrove’s recent work, You take turns to be food, Before you can grind wheat you have to be wheat, Before you can eat bread you are a nice new crust Eaten by Mary, who chooses a crust-you here, A mouthful of Shakespeare’s breath there, a glass Of ...”

“... desertions. Alcibiades could not resist boasting (truthfully or not) that during the absence of King Agis, who had gone to oversee the new outpost, he had seduced the queen. Any royal child she bore, Alcibiades claimed, would perpetuate his bloodline in Sparta. As a result – something he could ill afford – he not only made a deadly enemy of the ...”

“... doge, bred contempt for an official who was seen as no more than a ‘tavern sign’, a ‘painted king’, a ‘dumb figure’, a ‘King of China’, as contemporaries variously put it. This divorce between power and status may even have helped bring ritual itself into disrepute as ‘mere pageantry’, shadow without ...”

“... have liked a little more attention paid to his finery – including the gold chain he had from the King of France. Or then again, as a note here suggests, he may have been taking care of his ‘delicate relationship’ with Cosimo by distancing himself from Titian, who owed Cosimo a portrait. (Aretino made his money lampooning and flattering princes. Titian ...”

“... rumour has it that he is wholly lacking in integrity ... On the other hand there is in Hungary a king whose legs are markedly bulging and fat, and whose feet are long and square ... But, because the glory of his outstanding integrity of character is attested, he has deserved to obtain the fame of the royal crown, and his praises are proclaimed throughout ...”

“... a major villain to scale up the action. In Native Tongue it is Francis X. Kingsbury, aka Frankie King, mobster, property speculator and theme park owner; in Double Whammy a wonderfully sleazy television evangelist who has made a fortune from redneck religion coupled with competition fishing and is likewise into property development; in Skin Tight the action ...”

“... by landslips, browsing animals or fire. Writers have always found hard things to say about them. King Lear is found Crown’d with rank fumiter and furrow weeds, With hardocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo flow’rs, Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn. Darnel is a grass. The ‘tares’ of the parable, sown by an enemy among the ...”

“... a phone keypad. Obverse and reverse of a tablet listing plants in the garden of a Babylonian king, including mangelwurzel, fenugreek and ‘slave girlbuttock’ plant Some tablets are of course larger. Gilgamesh, thousands of words long, is an epic in 12 tablets more than a foot high, and inscriptions carved in rock are more expansive still. But it is ...”

“... they have encountered over the centuries in combining the roles of temporal and spiritual leader, king and priest – ‘two powers in one body’, as an anonymous 17th-century writer once put it. As a temporal ruler Alexander VII controlled only a mini-state with about a million inhabitants, about a twentieth of the size of the France of Louis XIV. There was ...”

“... 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 ...”