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“... series of eye-problems, partly the effects of undiagnosed porphyria, which eventually left the king blind. He was fascinated by the stage, and in the 1780s became drama critic for the Morning Post. He cultivated the friendship of actors, dramatists, theatre managers, with extraordinary assiduity; indeed, over a period of more than forty years he seems to ...”

“... when he took possession of a series of Caribbean islands in the name of the Spanish king. How could he have been contradicted, if no one understood what he was saying? Yet the claim is not void, it is an intricate legalism – as if we were to declare that silence is consent when we have gagged everyone who could speak. Again, the curious ...”

“... In all the stultifying discussion of Prince Charles’s fitness to grasp the orb and sceptre of kingship, there is one qualification that is almost never canvassed. I refer to his ability to give the annual Christmas broadcast to the Commonwealth. No light matter this – it was a dreaded annual penance for his grandfather – and made no lighter by his presumptive inability to end the chat by saying: ‘My wife and I ...”

“... was charged with corporate manslaughter over the ferry disaster at Zeebrugge), and like Lord King, whose advice Thatcher sought constantly without realising that British Airways was engaged in an entrepreneurial dirty tricks campaign against its main competitor, Lord Hanson became one of the Inner Circle which helped the Government to achieve what seemed ...”

“... dust-jacket to Forty Stories mentions Pynchon and Beckett, but this is the world of Thurber and Charles Addams. Barthelme’s more serious intentions were made clear from the start. In ‘Marie, Marie, hold on tight’ (a story not to be found here but in his first book Come back, Dr Caligari) three protestors picket a New York church, in order to ...”

“... is at least not obvious that the proposition ‘If Queen Victoria thought Prince Albert handsome, King George V collected postage stamps’ expresses a causal truth entirely on its own. I have to say that I disagree with Honderich not only on this point but over almost every opinion that I have so far attributed to him. To begin with, I see no need for the ...”

“... of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, again, lies in the contrivances by which the 19th-century hero Charles is furnished with the eye of a 20th-century social historian. As for Thackeray in Esmond, the thread of connection is here not a logical one, as with Waverley, but it is just as unmistakable – a matter of masterly ‘cheating’ and getting of the best ...”

“... at Harrow when he wrote Eric, having previously taught at Marlborough. As a boy he had attended King William’s College on the Isle of Man, an institution which took offence at close resemblances with scenes and incidents in the book. John Addington Symonds, who was head of a house at Harrow when Eric appeared, has put on record his youthful ‘disgust and ...”

“... crows. Even their debunking of the myth that ravens have been kept in the Tower since the time of Charles II concludes: ‘The power of ravens to make people believe the impossible and survive difficult times is obvious.’ Like many popular science books in recent years, this one claims its subject as the world-changing event, phenomenon or invention. Crows ...”

“... to wangle him a postgraduate fellowship to Cambridge, where, in 1937, Berryman carried off the Charles Oldham Shakespeare Scholarship, a victory in which both he and Van Doren took enormous pride. At this stage of his career, Berryman’s always sizable hunger for acclaim was directed mainly towards academia. He was already writing the poems which would ...”

“... As a result ‘going postal’ came to be used as a synonym for a berserk outburst of violence. Charles Bukowski’s butch, squalid autobiographical novel Post Office (1971) gives some idea of how this might have come about: ‘It was 12 hours a night, plus supervisors, plus clerks, plus the fact that you could hardly breathe in that pack of flesh, plus ...”

“... was to make lists of celebrities unhappily transfixed in this way by the force of circumstance. Charles Féré, for example, wrote in 1892, citing B.A. Morel: ‘Who has not heard,’ says Morel, ‘of the febrile fits which were produced in the savant Erasmus at the sight of a plate of lentils? . . . King James II ...”

“... animal, whatever it was, possessed extraordinary, supernatural powers. The famous wolf-hunter Jean-Charles d’Enneval, who succeeded Duhamel, antagonised the local worthies even more, by treating them as half-wits and failing to kill a single wolf in three months in a region where wolves seemed to outnumber human beings. By now, the nation was a laughing ...”

“... had very bbbad luck with your weather, Mr Piper.’ Apocryphal or not, the remark stuck. Trust the king to get it wrong: Mr Piper couldn’t have had better weather; he had made it so. His stormclouds over the Round Tower are as darkly fatty as British Restaurant oxtail soup. A touch of excess came naturally to him; he warmed to the worn pinnacle and the ...”

“... a scent of seawater. The theory of evolution is ascribed to Alfred Russel Wallace rather than to Charles Darwin, and it is ‘Shrösteinberg’s [rather than Shrödinger’s] anxiously anticipant cat’ which waits to discover if it is alive or dead within its box. We gradually realise that the main source of these errors, or differences between our universe ...”