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“... to his presence – and even then, only after he had first seen the envoys of some petty barbarian king. As is so often the way of ancient history, the richest evidence documents an event of little intrinsic significance: the mission of Maximinus and Priscus served only to authorise future embassies with ambassadors more to Attila’s taste. But in 450 ...”

“... them either, and yet they are right in thinking that childhood reminiscences make seductive books. Michael Schmidt was brought up in Mexico, and in his ‘not strictly autobiographical novel’, The Colonist, he turns with brilliant and painful concentration to his early years. No doubt he was in search of himself, and the making of what he now is – a ...”

“... January 1789, when it caused a sensation. When one reads it now, in this excellent new edition by Michael Sonenscher, where it appears for the first time in English alongside the other pamphlets Sieyès wrote in 1788, it is still easy to see why. It is not a beautiful or polished piece of writing, it is poorly organised and it is probably too long for what it ...”

“... to facilitate a Spanish invasion of England – caused James major political difficulties, but the King remained loyal to him. On the eve of his death in 1625, James recommended Huntly to his son Charles as ‘the most faithful servant that ever served a prince’. The summer of 1587 also saw the visit to Scotland of Guillaume de Salluste, seigneur du ...”

“... In March​ 1968, only a few days before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr visited Long Beach, a suburb of New York City, at the invitation of a local NAACP leader. Like many suburbs at that time, Long Beach was effectively a segregated community, with an African American population living in a tiny ghetto and working in the homes of local white families ...”

“... the replacement of Squire Allworthy by Mr Bounderby. In this interesting and original book, Michael Miller suggests that they may have ordered these things better in France. His subject is the history of the greatest of the 19th-century Paris department stores, the Bon Marché, from its creation until the 1914 War. In his conclusion, however, he ...”

“... With his capacity for self-dramatisation, he came to see her as his Antigone, following the old king into exile. She became an example of one of her own analytical inventions: her character ordered by the same logic of ‘altruistic surrender’ which she observed in nannies who replace wishes for themselves – for children, for a sexual life of their own ...”

“... among the trees, perched on an improbable cart waving a giant tooth above it. It belongs to Dr King Schultz, a German dentist turned bounty hunter, who wants to buy one of the slaves to help him identify felons. The actor is Christoph Waltz, who was so impeccably, horridly charming as a Nazi officer in Inglourious Basterds; here, as a whimsical ...”

“... Friedrich was lucky enough, via intermediaries, to sell on occasion to royal houses – the king of Prussia, the tsar – but never reliably enough to establish a taste for his work. When there was a sinecure in Dresden going (a professorship in landscape painting), Friedrich was found a smaller one. Many of his encounters with the public or with ...”

“... By​ the time his first opera, The Midsummer Marriage, had its premiere at Covent Garden in 1955, Michael Tippett was considered, alongside Benjamin Britten, the most significant and original British composer of his generation. Yet he was also the natural outsider in a scene that as well as Britten (born 1913), included William Walton (1902) and Lennox Berkeley (1903), with the reassuring presence of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872) hovering over them all ...”

“... of the Parliamentarian general, Sir William. The experiments of the 1650s were swept away as king, lords and bishops were thrust back into power with hardly a shot fired. The armies of the Commonwealth melted away, its tortured succession of governments abruptly ended and its chaotic Church dissipated. The people lined the streets to cheer their ...”

“... to keep Lib Dems on the margins for ever. In Germany, the liberals have gone from being the king-makers of the Kohl era to bystanders in Schröder’s. In Jospin’s France, it is not possible to be a genuine liberal at all. The word itself has collapsed into a synonym for ‘neo-liberal’, which means rabidly free market. Eleven out of the 15 ...”

“... a military replacement he ‘bought a pig’ (cochon vendu), and when asked why they preferred a king to a republic, peasants answered with a proverb that made local sense – ‘better to fatten one pig than feed five’. Listen to a field hand describing Monéys’s final moments: he ‘flailed his arms and legs and made sounds like the noises a hog makes ...”

“... There is a touch​ of Shylock in this,’ John Kerrigan says of a moment in King Lear. There are touches of Shylock in many places outside The Merchant of Venice, and indeed outside Shakespeare altogether, but this one is of unusual interest. It is in Cordelia’s speech responding to her father’s question about which of his daughters loves him most – well, to be precise, which of his daughters he is to say loves him most ...”

“... poetry does. It doesn’t even sound like a book I’d like. It’s the story of Martin Luther King’s murderer, James Earl Ray, mostly on the run in 1968, and mostly for a couple of weeks in Lisbon, spliced with reflection on a crisis (he of course doesn’t use such a word) in Muñoz Molina’s early life twenty years later, when his second child was ...”