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“... Benvenuto Cellini’s famous account of casting his giant Perseus for the Loggia della Signoria in Florence or Tarkovsky’s terror-stricken bell-maker in Andrei Rublev are not wholly inaccurate testaments to the high stakes involved, but it is also a technique that provides bronze with some surprising flashes of delicacy. On some of Degas’s bronzes, for ...”

“... of slaves. Having failed to achieve this, most of them then signed up as soldiers of the Spanish king. The first proclamations of universal emancipation were made separately, but on the same day – 29 August 1793 – by Sonthonax, the Jacobin commissioner, and by Toussaint Louverture, then still a Spanish general. I was impressed that ...”

“... In​ 1660, a Commonwealth warship called HMS Naseby sailed to the Dutch Republic to bring the new king-in-waiting home to England. During its journey the ship was renamed the Royal Charles in honour of the Restoration, but her figurehead – a vast carving of Cromwell on horseback, wearing laurels and ‘trampling six nations under foot’, as John Evelyn put it – remained in place ...”

“... Artemisia’s Allegory of Inclination (1615-16), by contrast, part of a decorative ceiling in Florence commissioned by Michelangelo’s great-nephew, makes sitting upright on a bank of clouds look plausible, even comfortable. Her nude female bodies take the temperature of their environment. In the early Susannah and the Elders (1610), the detail of ...”

“... paperbacks – and to Newbolt’s great delight Mary Coleridge did almost equally well with The King with Two Faces, a novel based on the murder of the Swedish king, in which the author identified herself closely and obviously with the aristocratic young hero. Newbolt was soon enveloped and adored by these dashing and ...”

“... Byron is the prototype of the first, Wordsworth of the second. The great Goethe was, in his time, king and emperor of both, and highly revered for it. In love with their fates, condemned by these to some suitable agony, the dramatisers had a more spectacular but more painful time of it than those whom Keats rather unfairly refers to as ‘large ...”

“... him guilty of sodomy. But there was no evidence that he had buggered anyone. A male servant, Florence Fitzpatrick, after being given a promise of immunity, had confessed to mutual masturbation. The Law Lords maintained that this was a sexual practice sufficiently unnatural to count as sodomy (a view which later courts were to dismiss as a bad ...”

“... Jackanapes in Prating Alley (1693), articulates satire through imaginary titles such as Near is my King, but nearer is my Skin (‘to be sold at the Sign of the Jack-Pudding’); A Dissertation of the No Power of a No Parliament, making a No King, that will always be doing us No Good; and A New-invented Mathematical ...”

“... The Prince is dedicated) had read Machiavelli’s book, ‘they grabbed the principality of Florence, and turned the republic into a duchy.’ The stage was set for Machiavelli as a republican cacodemon too devious for his own good. In Elizabethan and Jacobean drama ‘Machiavel’ was the stock tag for a personification of evil. In Henry VI Part ...”

“... is the national anthem, so it’s a bit like having a British political party called God Save the King). One of the party’s early symbols was a knotted red, white and green rope, though it has since reverted to the fiamma tricolore.The PdL, Lega Nord and FdI ran together in the 2013 election, losing narrowly – the margin was less than half a percentage ...”

“... well-known preference for republics over monarchies? What about his view that contemporary Florence needed a governo largo rather than a governo stretto? What of the opinion expressed in the Discourses that the masses (la moltitudine), when entrusted with power, ‘are more knowing and more constant than is a prince’? The replies that Mansfield ...”

“... glass. All these things had been eliminated by 1525, as Zwingli’s Zurich outdid Savonarola’s Florence in the burning of vanities and the denunciation of frivolity. Wherever they are in Europe, Zwingli’s heirs have generally become more reasonable. They don’t now judicially drown Christians they disagree with in rivers, as Zwingli’s friends on the ...”

“... that Albania didn’t really have one.In the postwar years, Albania became more royal than the king. It broke with the Soviet Union after Khrushchev tried to shut down the Stalin cult in 1956. It broke with China in the late 1970s when Hoxha sensed Beijing was cosying up to the West (Mao, Hoxha decided, had been playing a Marxist-Leninist when in fact he ...”

“... the linen sheets he had slept on were reverently folded away, unwashed. One was kept by Florence Macdonald, to be her burial shroud, and the other, many years later, was wrapped around Flora herself before she was laid in her coffin. There were more adventures and forced marches by night before Flora finally said farewell to the prince in an upper ...”

“... were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life out of the story of this king.’ To the 17th-century republicans Edmund Ludlow and Algernon Sidney, Henry would be ‘that monster of mankind’, ‘one of the most violent princes we ever had’. To Bolingbroke in the 18th century, Henry’s would appear the most ‘severe’ of ...”