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“... He was a doomed man. In spite of his enormous youthful popularity, he was ill-fitted to be a King or President or Head of State of any kind. His inner confidence was early and fatally corroded by ceaseless bullying from his martinet father, George V, and by a lack of maternal love. Amateur psychology in biography is a prevalent and dangerous fashion ...”

“... She goes.    Then:    ‘Iris.’    ‘Sire?’    ‘Visit Troy. Tell its King: You are to bring your son’s corpse home. Its ransom – large. Appropriate. Go now. Alone, save for your driver. You will be treated with respect.’ *    Troy.    ‘King,’ Iris said, ‘You are to bring ...”

“... fond of bogus erudition – the Brexit white paper was, he said, ‘the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Philip II at Le Goulet in 1200’ – and he must have enjoyed expressing his hope that it would ‘not be necessary for Her Majesty’s stay at Sandringham to be interrupted by her in person having to prorogue Parliament’. Speaking the ...”

“... Levi Roach​ ’s book is an attempt to redeem the reputation of Æthelred II, king of England, with one interruption, from 978 to 1016. This is a hard task, as the book’s title concedes: Æthelred has been known as ‘the Unready’ for around a thousand years. Ever since 1066 and All That (originally a parody of Oxford University exam papers) he has also been logged as ‘the first Weak King of England ...”

“... school up the road – ever saw, and I appreciated it. Round a corner or two in Petty Cury was King Street, where there stood a rank of pubs. A rite of passage in those days was to inhale a pint of suds in each within the space of an hour – the ‘King Street run’ – without puking, or without puking until the ...”

“... and a nameless son bearing the corpse of the father he has just killed, both of them watched by a king who, having inherited the crown from his never-to-be-equalled father, has now disinherited his own son, thereby occasioning the battle. Outside the obsessively patrilineal English histories, trouble between fathers and daughters seems just as common, whether ...”

“... the world    with all it needed of bicycle saddles and cigarette papers, where cough syrup was king.    Round the corner,    just when you least expect, there’s Blokeston FC, home of ‘The Blockers’, and Blokeston Prison, by the same no-frills architect.    Unmissable from any position,    the Bulwark Brewery stands up in a haze of its own ...”

“... than two pages devoted to its royal house, which is rather modest considering that His Majesty King Michael I of Romania serves as Chairman of the Comité de Patronage of the Société des Amis de I’Almanach de Gotha 1998. From these pages I learn that Michael or Mihai was born to King Carol in 1921 and ...”

“... come for Hene Harry Peg stol the Doters hat but she was Cott: he being Old whit berd Like the Old King smild angerlie give me Ma sad ile Tan you my girl pa a way and she wolop Pege after Than pa come in he sade wer is harry and Ma cride he past over and pa Lift his Ey on to HEVEN its a Merce * all so 2 older: Ma sad you woned for the ANGEL blesing she rade ...”

“... he was being outflanked on the right. Manteuffel and some reactionary associates were urging the king to shut down the compromise, on the grounds that it was unacceptable for mere parliamentarians to tamper with the military prerogatives of the crown. It’s what happened next that matters. Seeing immediately that the game had changed, Bismarck dropped the ...”

“... Modernists such as Picasso begot paper collage, wood assemblage and metal sculpture. ‘I’m king of the ragpickers!’ Picasso proclaimed gleefully around 1930, after he had created Woman in a Garden, his first welded tin and scrap iron sculpture, proof that machines and Tin Can Alley do not ‘rule the world’, as Leopold Bloom laments over noisy ...”

“... involved with the plan then defect to an FBI-run operation directed against Martin Luther King, which Littell is also unwillingly forced to join – and so on and so on and so on for 672 pages of murders, freak-outs, double-crosses, celebrity cameos and shifting power relationships between the three protagonists, eventually culminating in the ...”

“... of American resolve is in prospect, the figure of Hitler is as difficult to exclude as the head of King Charles. The drawback in the analogy is that, from a Hitler, it is impossible to demand much less than his complete destruction or unconditional surrender. Still, other keywords such as ‘expansion’ and ‘poison gas’ do keep on creeping in. Partly as a ...”

“... but a strong sense of constitutional probity, then one might expect to find some evidence that the King-in-waiting was warned to be circumspect. But there’s not a hint, in all of Ziegler’s industrious fossickings, of any concern on that score. There was some royal pursing of the lips at his levity and laziness – despite costly tuition, he never achieved ...”

“... were not painful enough, the malign intelligence behind the plot had been the kaiser’s uncle, King Edward VII, who had died in 1910: This, in a nutshell, is the true, naked situation engineered so slowly and surely by Edward VII, elaborated and systematically expanded through covert talks with Paris and St Petersburg, and at last brought to completion ...”