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“... red brick terraces of the Lisburn Road, where Ulster banners fly from the lampposts, to the City Hall with its eau-de-nil dome and pale stone statue of Queen Victoria. The clinic isn’t easy to find: the signs beside the door at No 14 are for BioKinetic Europe, which runs clinical trials, MKB Law, and Bupa; next door there’s a Tesco Express and Boojum, a ...”

“... of the Chinese devil doctor Fu Manchu, the invention of an Edwardian hack-writer and music-hall lyricist who called himself Sax Rohmer. Fu Manchu has green eyes, a close-shaven skull, a long silken robe, an Arabian slave-girl and a performing marmoset; and he wages war on the West, pretty much for the hell of it, with the aid of a small army of ...”

“... today. The Russian Orthodox were always a tiny minority, though in the 18th century under Catherine the Great, allegedly an enlightened ruler, one of the largest forcible conversions in European history took place, obliging Uniates to adopt Orthodoxy. When national movements arose elsewhere in Europe, Belarus was dormant, thanks to low levels of ...”

“... bright feathers in broad-brimmed hats as well as highly wrought cuirasses and greaves (Campion Hall in Oxford has a splendid set of these paintings, rare in Europe). Jehovah’s Witnesses, we are told, believe that Michael is the ‘non-incarnate’ Jesus before and after his spell on Earth. There are oddments of information like this throughout ...”

“... Alongside his factory, he had built a neoclassical mansion for his family to live in, Etruria Hall, which was depicted on one of the serving dishes he had made for Catherine the Great. The non-conforming, one-legged potter had made a place for himself in many of the most powerful and influential establishments in ...”

“... of the film? In support of this interpretation, Twilight’s fighty dénouement happens in a hall of mirrors – in a ballet studio – with a twist involving home movies on VHS and a baddie who has brought along his own mini-DV camera (‘I thought this room would be visually dramatic for my little film,’ he says). Another mirror is placed right at ...”

“... without a commission. A spell fighting in the Black Sea against the Turks as a rear admiral in Catherine the Great’s navy ended abruptly when he was accused of raping a ten-year-old girl and in 1790 he returned to France in disgrace.He died in Paris in July 1792 at the age of 45 and was buried in the Saint Louis Protestant Cemetery. A few weeks ...”

“... black man, who yells back at him with equal vehemence. This ‘raises the spectre of racism’, Catherine Wheatley writes in her monograph on the film, and she thinks Anne settles the matter ‘with a measure of temperance’: both men were at fault, neither one was looking.† Georges and Anne are educated, enlightened, surely not personally racist. Yet ...”

“... a doorway and find anything. Yesterday we walked into a random basilica that housed the body of Catherine of Siena – well, everything except her head. ‘The people of Siena wished to have Catherine’s body,’ I learn. Don’t we all.Knowing that they could not smuggle her whole body out of Rome, they decided to take ...”

“... his Lionel Bart tendency. The production numbers that animate his pitch, so that he can be a music hall turn as well as a scholarship boy. A fabulous exuberance and a chameleon respect, that has him becoming, or seeming to become, the thing he witnesses. ‘The eye altering alters all.’ He offers a sympathetic reading to Blake’s ‘babooneries’, the ...”

“... Invocation of the Graces’, lived here until she was cleared, probably in the 1820s. She was Catherine MacAulay, one of several people too old or infirm to go to Canada. In the words of the folklorist Alexander Carmichael, ‘she wandered about from house to house and from townland to townland, warmly welcomed and cordially received wherever she ...”

“... two fat cats, while competitors were excluded by threats or lies or were simply locked out of the hall. Putin was right to see the oligarchs as intolerable. Their power was an insult to any notion of fairness, let alone equality, and no stable political structure could be rebuilt while they held sway (several, including Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky and ...”

“... about him, supposing that he was travelling or busy with the estate.‘Petersburg is the front hall, Moscow is the maids’ quarters, but the country is our study,’ says another ex-officer, retiring from the tedious excitement of the capital to his country estate, in the prose fragment ‘A Novel in Letters’. ‘A decent man passes of necessity through ...”

“... an industrious but uninspired architect who helped to bungle a commission to build the Vestry Hall in Hampstead – was unfairly disparaged by his wife’s more prosperous family. He was humble and kind-hearted, too easily persuaded to spend money on grand Bloomsbury houses, and fond of visiting the orphans in Coram’s Fields. His pretty wife liked to ...”

“... It’s the home of the Lascelles family, an ancestor of which, John Lascelles, blew the gaffe on Catherine Howard, the king’s fifth wife, but was later culled himself in the purge of evangelicals during that dreadful monarch’s last years. I watch two of the now well-established red kites tumbling about the sky above the Harewood estate, home these days ...”