“... direct action. He was the youngest speaker at the March on Washington in 1963, where Martin Luther King delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ address.On many occasions, Lewis courted beatings and arrest in order to bring attention to the racial mistreatment that was pervasive in the Jim Crow South. In Selma, Alabama, on 7 March 1965, he led marchers who were ...”

“... main London dealer and worked with both Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. Brausen asked the young David Sylvester to write something for the catalogue. His response remains acute: Richier, he declared, asks ‘not only how much damage the human body can endure and still remain human, but also how far the human body can be twisted into the shape of sub-human ...”

“... it to the small screen. The British settings are spectacular, the whole thing like an implosion of David Kynaston, but the main achievement is Morgan’s, in finding ways to show the human side of monarchy. The British royals are a terrifying shower, but quite likeable, and sometimes essential, in their daftness, in their cunning and their opportunism, as well ...”

“... The archbishop of Paris fretted to the prime minister that it could lead to the beheading of the king, ‘as is done in England’. Until the 1750s, the quarrel excited considerably more attention in France than the writings of a few daring philosophes. By the time of the Girard-Cadière affair, the quarrel had become extremely unequal. The pope, the ...”

“... mindful of his Christian faith. He flattered Louis XIV but denounced monarchs who, like the Sun King, made war and generated misery. Although he wrote about fields and farmyards and celebrated rural quiet, he was a devout Parisian and addicted to salon talk. He wrote decorously of love but frequented taverns and brothels, and his sunny verse was the product ...”

“... the overthrow of the Ancien Régime – including the thousands of Parisian women who forced the king and court to abandon Versailles on 6 October 1789 – and calls for women’s equality were especially strong in the early years of the revolution. In 1790, the mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet demanded full civil rights for women: ‘Why ...”

“... elsewhere, but the English monarchy has long liked to acquire pictures of artists. Charles I, a king much absorbed by how he was himself depicted, bought, commissioned or was given numerous artist portraits. The Commonwealth sold Charles’s collection, and although many of those pictures were reacquired by Charles II, a Dürer self-portrait, for ...”

“... there. The two most familiar images of the men express the contrast eloquently. First, there is David’s brilliant portrait of Napoleon on his rearing charger in the Alps, seemingly master of the wind, rocks and sky; second, Chateaubriand’s acid description of Talleyrand hobbling into the presence of Louis XVIII with the help of Napoleon’s sinister ...”

“... Geoffrey Hill’s second collection of poems, King Log, was published in 1968, that year of student radicalism and disappointment. Hill’s title is reactionary in its implications and derives from Aesop’s fable of the frogs who desired a king. In my edition of L’Estrange’s royalist version of Aesop the fable runs like this: The Frogs, living an easy, free life everywhere among the lakes and ponds, assembled together, one day, in a very tumultuous manner, and petitioned Jupiter to let them have a King ...”

“... the fiasco in 1970 when Syrian troops entered Jordan in support of the PLO and were driven out by King Hussein. But he had little influence over the doctors’ policies and little sympathy with their reckless, dogmatic government. Asad came to power determined to bring about the social and economic transformation of Syria and to turn his country into a major ...”

“... a place not altogether unlike the white-ruled South Africa evoked in the frank confessional of David Schalkwyk’s opening chapter. In the apartheid world, the young Schalkwyk ‘was defined legally, socially and … psychologically as a “master”’, even as the material realities of bondage were masked (and painfully complicated) by the emotional ...”

“... a rider gratis in a well-appointed coach. At a certain point Gillray starts to identify the king with John Bull – a freeholder of uncertain description, rough without meanness, and if mentally thick, nonetheless a durable and somehow a reassuring presence.William Blake’s​ parents, like Gillray’s, belonged to the Moravian Church, and their early ...”

“... it decides to go alone’. A number of influential politicians, including the state’s founder, David Ben-Gurion, believed that going to war was a mistake, particularly without American backing. But Eshkol was a weak leader, viewed with contempt by Israel’s aggressive young generals, and unable to stand his ground against the growing pressure for ...”

“... will be encouraged to learn that Montreal schools in those days displayed portraits of the King, and that Kipling was known as ‘our late beloved poet’. The King had a ‘stiff, elegant Queen’ by his side. He died on a cold day in January, and they prayed for him in chapel. We are not in a French-Canadian ...”

“... influence on the generations that followed. Following Osborne’s death in 1994, however, David Hare, among others, leaped to the playwright’s defence, in his memorial eulogy and a longer lecture first delivered in 2002 and repeated on the stage of the Royal Court on the 50th anniversary of Look Back in Anger’s opening. Now John Heilpern has taken ...”