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“... political history of the anti-Americanism that comes to us so easily? Before leftist subjects of Her Majesty get snooty about American democracy, we might stop and wonder whose interests are served by our unshakable optimism about the past. The unguarded naiveties of Achieving Our Country are not quite as negligent as they look, and the book may well ...”

“... easy for the artist to adjust the appearance of the sitter to the requirements of his or her social role. Occasionally it is possible to catch Velazquez in the act of doing just this, as in the cases of Juan Mateos, the royal huntsman, and the sculptor Juan Martinez Montanes (neatly juxtaposed by Brown with less flattering representations of the same ...”

“... it in there with the chopsticks yearning to contribute in a non-confrontational way to Miss X & her sister & her sister’s Awful Husband’s conversazione on blue fin versus yellow fin and then the ‘whole environmental thing’ (this from a cunt who ate a turtle in Indonesia) I was saying nothing – I’m saying ...”

“... of any current situation: ‘Queen Mary, she’s my friend/Yes I believe I’ll go see her again,’ in the extraordinary song ‘Just Like a Woman’, or: When your mother sends back all your invitations And your father to your sister he explains That you’re tired of yourself and all of your creations Won’t you come see me, Queen ...”

“... brings these dubieties to the surface again. She is much aware of them herself, and she begins her book by asking – or almost asking – the unforgivable, inescapable preliminary question: is Edith Sitwell’s poetry any good at all? She gives some illustrations of the total uncertainty about her subject’s importance ...”

“... You see, it is simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication.’ This is Cicely in The Importance of Being Earnest refusing to let Algernon look at her diary. But it could easily be her flesh-and-blood contemporary Alma Mahler protecting hers ...”

“... reason.A call from Barry Cryer, who claims to have heard a woman outside Liberty’s saying to her husband: ‘Remind me to tell Austin that there is no main verb in that sentence.’15 January, Yorkshire. Trying to put my forty-year-old letters in order, I come across a diary for 1956-59. It’s depressing to read as very little of it is factual and most ...”

“... Sharon Henderson. In 1992 I was the crime reporter on the Journal in Newcastle. I had been sent to her flat on the Wear Garth estate close to the docks in the East End of Sunderland after her seven-year-old daughter, Nikki, was murdered – battered with a brick and stabbed 37 times. She had gone missing around 10 p.m. on 7 ...”

“... could be. Not for him the lachrymose sentimentality which, at the Queen’s behest and with her all-too-active co-operation, Theodore Martin lavished on the Prince Consort; still less the ‘feline skill’ of Sidney Lee who, disregarding the advice of Edward VII, ‘Stick to Shakespeare, Mr Lee, there’s money in Shakespeare,’ produced a ...”

“... again interrupted by very broad errors. One at least still lingered for Carol Clark to correct in her version of The Prisoner. When sleeping, Albertine is said to shed ‘the various marks of humanity which had so disappointed me’, ‘ses différents caractères d’humanité qui m’avaient déçu’. Even in the most recent revision of Scott Moncrieff ...”

“... Albert. Later, on entering university, he would drop the Albert. ‘So if anyone asks you what Her Britannic Majesty Queen Victoria had in common with Chinua Achebe, the answer is: they both lost their Albert. A diligent and gifted schoolboy who collected scholarships as one gathers wood, he entered the newly established ...”

“... mummy’s gilded mask was donated to the British Museum; the coffin went to Lady Susan Meux for her private museum of Egyptian artefacts at Theobalds Park in Hertfordshire. She died in 1911, leaving her collection to the British Museum, but they didn’t want it: it was a condition of ...”

“... clear, Queen Victoria was much concerned to defend what she regarded as the rightful exercise of her own prerogative. She recognised that the pass had been sold by her Hanoverian predecessors but, since she was by title ‘Supreme Governor of the Church of England’, she saw no reason why she should not be intimately ...”

“... as a whole. As Cleopatra says of the messenger who reports on Octavia, ‘The man has seen some majesty and should know.’ But these people felt no awe and registered no majesty. One struggles to find in other arts analogies to this absurd situation, in which people who have not in any genuine sense read Shakespeare (and ...”

“... in for a huge amount of racist and sexist abuse on social media and in the mainstream press, and her appearance in a BBC documentary about the Nazis was objected to on grounds of her vocal pro-Palestine politics. Many of Jones and Sarkar’s critics attempt to reduce their views to their identities, as a gay man and woman ...”