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“... a single non-royal person was common, even commoner than either genuinely personal monarchy, the king his own minister, or conciliar, collegial government. The question why this should have been so also yields answers which may apply to many, even most cases. The most obvious explanation might seem to be pathological: the personal inadequacy of monarchs who ...”

“... for him. He was to marry his first cousin, Victoria, a few months his senior, and as de facto king of England he would work for the creation of a united Germany under Prussia. Studious, intelligent and good-natured, Albert put his shoulder to the dynastic wheel. By the age of 16 he was writing an essay on German national character. Victoria ...”

“... Jacobeans, while including a host of nonentities, such as Pomfret, Stepney, Dyer, Smith, Duke and King, was at the very least defective and misleading. The fault was not Dr Johnson’s. The guilty men, as a contemporary noted, were not ‘the illustrious scholar but his employers, who thought themselves … the best judges of vendible poetry’. Johnson’s ...”

“... in Venice some time around Hanukkah in 1523. Calling himself ‘son of Solomon and brother to King Joseph’, ruler of the lost tribes of Reuben, Gad and Manasseh that dwelt in the far east of myth, beyond the Sambatyon (‘a river so Jewish it observed the Sabbath’), David sought (and even more surprisingly received) audiences with Pope Clement VII and ...”

“... Richard Hotot gives a sense of time’s fractured geometry, dating a book to ‘the 33rd year of King Henry [III] son of King John, which is 5448 years from the beginning of the world, 1249 from the birth of Christ, 1216 from Christ’s death, 544 from the building of Peterborough, 184 from the Norman Conquest, 79 from the ...”

“... a ferry that sank in the Firth of Forth carrying a large quantity of gold and silver belonging to Charles I, the tomb of King Alaric I and treasure from King John’s baggage train. Oh, and the lost city of Atlantis. What Merlin Burrows is selling often seems too good to be true, but ...”

“... when he included the verse ‘Look at that gal shake that thing./We can’t all be Martin Luther King’ in the second edition of his anthology, The Poetry of the Negro; the lines were originally written for the first issue, in June 1960, of the Student Voice, organ of the Student Non-Violent Co-Ordinating Committee, by its editor Julian Bond, now chair of ...”

“... not want to take military action against the Scots; he had also been opposed to the execution of Charles. Though Fairfax’s outlook and his Horatian retirement from public life are reflected subtly in the poems, Marvell came to admire Cromwell in the years from 1653 to Cromwell’s death in 1658 – he was the de facto laureate to the new state. He also ...”

“... Cavell’s widely influential study of screwball, Pursuits of Happiness (1981). Multimillionaire Charles ‘Hopsy’ Pike (Henry Fonda) is beguiled twice over by a temptress (Barbara Stanwyck) whom he encounters for the first time as Jean, a con artist working a cruise ship, and then as Lady Eve Sidwich, guest of honour at a party thrown in the Pike family ...”

“... swimming, and eating in wooded groves; a latterday Elagabalus, perhaps, or an early version of King Charles VI of France, employer of the famous 14th-century chef Taillevent and another monarch in whose life the themes of women and groves recur.)The dominion of ideas is also characteristically French. Nineteenth-century Paris was the core of the ...”

“... and spit on the other children. 12 February. A shoddy programme about the conviction of Jonathan King for offences against young men dating back twenty-five years and more. While it features some of the police involved, it manages not to ask the pertinent question: if these 15-year-old boys had been 15-year-old girls and romping round in Rolls-Royces even ...”

“... a habit of playing politics when he shouldn’t was the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King. Throughout the financial crisis, Brown believed that King went beyond his remit in permitting his political views – particularly what Brown calls ‘his personal attitude to debt’ – to interfere with his policy ...”

“... Velázquez’s surviving work. They are tall – as tall as many a full-dress portrait of the king – and narrow: an inch short of six feet high, and just a little over three feet across. This suggests that they were conceived together; some historians have thought they may have hung in the same room; the inventory almost says so, but not quite. It is ...”

“... the wish to possess the parent of the opposite sex and eliminate that of the same sex’, as Charles Rycroft put it in his Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis.Freud was talking about what he called, with no apparent irony, the ‘positive’ Oedipus complex. But this implies that there is also a ‘negative’ Oedipus complex, in which, Freud ...”