“... Great), Kant, Catherine (the Great), Plato, Alexander (the Great), Aristotle, Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Constantine, ‘the Anarchs old’ – before describing ‘how and by what paths I have been brought/To this dread pass’.One spring morning, Rousseau found himself ‘asleep/Under a mountain’ beside a ‘gentle rivulet’ when a ...”

“... like St Paul, Joan of Arc and Van Gogh, may or may not have had epilepsy, and some of whom, like Julius Caesar, Dostoevsky and Harriet Tubman, almost certainly did. He also keeps vigil over his brother, determined ‘to discover what it was that marked him with epilepsy’ – how he had been changed by the condition and what it was that made him ...”

“... detail takes the place of the speculatively personal. If 1599 – when Shakespeare wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar and As You Like It, as well as beginning Hamlet – was ‘the most decisive year of his career, one in which he redefined himself and his theatre’, that transformation could be understood only in relation to the year’s turbulent ...”

“... to imitate almost anyone, men and women. The characters Brando portrayed in his early films, from Julius Caesar (1953), say, to One-Eyed Jacks (1961), were full of rage; and rage, as late as his autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me (1994), was at the centre of Brando’s story about himself. Rage against his father, mainly, but also a more diffuse ...”

“... gloves more often than not had to fend for themselves. Gielgud was never out of work, unlike his Julius Caesar co-star the late Marlon Brando, who made a fabulous cult of his non-appearance on stage, and whose indolence and contempt for the business causes Gielgud to look like a worker bee, making regular honey at no great expense to the spirit. Brando ...”

“... in the Greek tradition, though almost never as aesthetically pleasing.As the republic fractured, Julius Caesar became the first living man to see his portrait on a Roman coin; his ideological heir, Mark Antony, and his legal heir, Octavian, followed suit, as did some of their rivals. After Octavian, as Augustus, cemented ...”

“... roles for castrati were the alpha males Alexander the Great, Richard I, Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar. Boys were castrated to make them better and stronger singers, not to make them girls. On the other hand, while living in the house of a Russian prince the castrato Balatri ‘gained unheard of access to the sexually segregated, staunchly ...”

“... and so far no copy seems to have turned up of the despatch which Pontius Pilate sent to Tiberius Caesar, as Tertullian testifies. For a recent parallel, observe the Decree of Themistocles, enjoining various measures to be taken at an early stage in the campaign that was to terminate with the Battle of Salamis. The copy was inscribed on stone about two ...”

“... conditions at their most corrupt. Hamlet was probably immediately preceded in the theatre by Julius Caesar, a masterly work of mixed form that might be called tragical political history – and Polonius strongly hints that he played Caesar in it. Republican conspirators carry out a mirror-image act of revenge ...”

“... Shakespeare’s profound political ‘realism’ by arguing that a recollection of the mob in Julius Caesar helps one to understand the tragic dilemma of the Shah of Iran, betrayed by his friends and abused by a ‘shouting throng’ of demonstrators. When Shakespeare’s authority is invoked to prove that all mobs and foreigners are always the ...”

“... physic, which ‘might hurt … one that he so loved and affected’, to recall the dying words of Julius Caesar: ‘Et tu Brute? Et tu filii?’ To Bellany and Cogswell the words carried an ‘unmistakable’ implication: that James’s death was an ‘assassination’. If Eglisham’s charges had been in Parliament’s mind, the ‘implication’ would ...”

“... of Cicero, one of her favourites, were collected after his death by his loyal secretary, Tiro. Julius Caesar compiled a collection of his own, although Augustus, his heir, is said to have suppressed publication and there may have been unofficial collections of Augustus’ own one-liners as well as those of his naughty daughter Julia in ...”

“... and Camilla stood at the altar wearing a hat which briefly put one in mind of a cross between Julius Caesar and the Statue of Liberty, a combination appropriate, perhaps, to her position in the royal household. Generally speaking, however, the white suburban theme managed very well to survive the austere beauty of the 15th-century chapel. The groom ...”

“... in popular unrest of the sort shown in the Jack Cade scenes of Henry VI Part II and by the mob in Julius Caesar. To make Timon of Athens a play for today is to cut through a lot of differences between Jacobean and modern London. Again, this is defensible, given the extent to which the tragedy uses Lucian and Plutarch’s version of ancient Athens to ...”

“... Ninh, where they worship an eclectic group of heroes, prophets and saints – Jesus and Muhammad, Julius Caesar, Sun Yat-Sen, Joan of Arc and Victor Hugo (the last two again exhibiting French colonial influence). The press corps in Saigon used to hang around the veranda of the Hotel Continentale, waiting for a lead, and one day in June 1972 they ...”