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“... vaguely ludicrous. To this general picture of neglect and oblivion there is one shining exception, Alfred, still always by convention ‘the Great’. There has even been a film about him, if one of no great success. Statues of him stand at Wantage and at Winchester. The 1100th anniversary of his arguably world-changing victory at Edington passed apparently ...”

“... daisy chain continued to get longer: in 1901 Olive Custance – who eventually eloped with Lord Alfred Douglas – had affairs with both Barney and Vivien. A year later Vivien met Baroness Hélène van Zuylen, nicknamed ‘La Brioche’ for the way she curled her hair, and started an affair. Barney became jealous, dubbed van Zuylen a fat Valkyrie, and was ...”

“... first gone to Egypt to survey Khufu’s pyramid at Giza, inspired by the astronomer Charles Piazzi Smyth, who believed that the pyramid would prove to have a perimeter of 36,524 ‘pyramid inches’ (a pyramid inch was 1/25th of a ‘sacred cubit’, a supposed ancient unit of measurement invented by Isaac Newton). Smyth’s ...”