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“... that it included a copy of that indispensable guide to survival and success in the presence of a prince, Castiglione’s Courtier. Whether he needed Castiglione’s advice or not, Velazquez was certainly a success at the court of Philip IV. Indeed, from our point of view he might be described as too much of a success, for as Brown well shows, from the early ...”

“... and goes wandering in a countryside devastated by war. Finding herself in the castle of her lost prince’s betrothed, a sinfully ugly bride who sprains her ankle on the wedding-day, Maid Maleen exchanges identity with her and goes, protected by the veil, to the church. Nettles in the path are instructed to recognise Maleen as the true wife; the ...”

“... Prince Khaled bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, commander-in-chief of all foreign forces in the Gulf War, nephew of King Fahd, and son of the Saudi Defence Minister, Prince Sultan, used to employ an American public relations company to manage his press conferences. Deep in the high-pile carpeted interior of the Saudi Ministry of Defence, an Irish-American of massive build – a certain Mr Lynch from Chicago – would stand just behind Prince Khaled, choosing which journalists should be permitted to ask questions and suggesting to the rather portly Saudi commander how he should reply ...”

“... fanfare, like an elephant cry. At nightfall in this quarry a few kilometres outside Avignon, Peter Brook’s staging of Jean-Claude Carrière’s adaptation of The Mahabharata begins. Wisdom-book and story-repository, fifteen times the size of the Bible, The Mahabharata was written in Sanskrit, but the words you hear are French, spoken with a piquant ...”

“... Aristide was a parish priest working in an impoverished and embattled district of Port-au-Prince. He became the spokesman of a growing popular movement against the series of military regimes that ruled Haiti after the collapse in 1986 of the Duvalier dictatorship. In 1990 he won the country’s first democratic presidential election, with 67 per cent ...”

“... of Federico Cesi, along with his library and scientific collections. In 1603, Cesi (eventually Prince of Acquasparta), then 18 years old, founded a body he called the Academy of the Lincei. Although the Academy is now remembered (if at all) because Cesi became Galileo’s devoted and ardent supporter, the energies of its members were directed as much ...”

“... was Europe’s closest approximation to Tibet – a theocracy, ruled by celibate orthodox prince-bishops selected from the boys of the Njegusi tribe, who live in the stony valleys south of the former capital, Cetinje. The last of the prince-bishops and the greatest Romantic poet in the Balkans was Petar II ...”

“... what poetry always does. So the singing clowns who fail to amuse Baudelaire’s bored young prince reappear in Moore as Elvis, Charlie Chaplin, Dylan Thomas, Louis Armstrong, Brenda Lee or Spike Milligan. It’s now the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, Biafra, Mosley and the fashionable dramas of ‘Kitchen-Sink Sade-Marats’ whose atrocious crimes fail to ...”

“... than the 19th-century château itself. They were built to a design by Jean Aubert for the seventh prince de Condé in the early 1700s. He believed he would be reincarnated as a horse. That story, which wanders from guidebook to guidebook, seems to offer as good an insight as one is going to get into the prince’s mind. In ...”

“... glaciers. The discordant presence of the English tourists becomes central to the story when the prince is shocked by the meanness of the smart, rich English, listening on the hotel balcony but giving no money to the itinerant musician who sings to them about climbing Mount Rigi. Turner, illustrator of travel books as well as painter, benefited from the ...”

“... craftsmanship of his rendering of detail tends to mask. It is as though the spirit of a prince-painter, like Titian, were trammelled by the rich burden of a craftsman’s skills and ...”

“... matter waiting every morning to be chopped and shaped keeps the old knives bright. Napoleon, the Prince of Wales and any number of politicians (some of whom, like Canning, eagerly solicited an appearance in his prints) all collected cartoons – and politicians’ offices and lavatories today are decorated with them. The cartoonist is condemned to chastise a ...”

“... for the financier John Julius Angerstein (who paid 800 guineas) The Village Holiday; for the Prince Regent Blind Man’s Buff (finished 1813). Wilkie became an associate and then a member of the Royal Academy while very young; he was knighted and made a painter to the King. He was well-rewarded as a portraitist. Personally he was unprepossessing. This ...”

“... goes there,’ Horace Walpole reported. ‘You can’t set your foot without treading on a Prince, or Duke of Cumberland.’ These colourful pleasures are shown in black and white, for this is an exhibition dominated by engravings. Reynolds’s portrait of Garrick being tugged right and left by Comedy and Tragedy is here, but as a ...”

“... universal extra-professional unpopularity of architects (what other Royal Institution could the Prince of Wales put the boot into with such sure expectation of applause?) is no new phenomenon. Distrust of the man who knows what you want better than you know it yourself goes back at least as far as the 17th century. Roger North, an amateur architect whose ...”