“... public life and speaking. In the course of the Roman civil wars that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar, Marcus Tullius Cicero – the most powerful public speaker and debater in the Roman world, ever – was lynched. The hit-squad that took him out triumphantly brought his head and hands to Rome, and pinned them up, for all to see, on the ...”

“... enfant terrible in the theatre, with adaptations of Shakespeare, a negro Macbeth, a famous Mercury Julius Caesar and the banned The cradle will rock by Marc Blitzstein. The notorious radio production of The War of the Worlds and his epic compilation of Shakespeare’s History plays, Five Kings, convinced Hollywood that they wanted him as actor, or ...”

“... freedom. Henrietta finds it delightful, for instance, that the footling Bantling speaks of Julius Caesar as a ‘cheeky old boy’. James seeds Henrietta’s speech with tiny, revealing lapses – her habit of referring to the Ancien Régime as ‘the ancient régime’ nicely marks the gap between her and Bantling’s classical education. We know ...”

“... fifteen, addressed to students at Harvard. Her audacity is striking: she cites Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, warns the students against sin and gives her own synopsis of their learning. The same ‘Powerfull hand’ of God that had ‘Brought me in Safety from the dark abode’ of Africa gave the students knowledge of ‘the ethereal Space/And ...”

“... dedications (to such as Mussolini – hailed in a copy of La Poussière de soleils as a ‘modern Julius Caesar’ – Proust, Colette, Robert Desnos, Pierre Loti ‘dont on ne doit prononcer le nom qu’à genoux’), self-promoting publicity handouts, details of his extravagant theatrical ventures, press clippings describing his roulotte, a luxury ...”

“... away, and that suspicious sewing needle on the floor, the Passionists saw eloquent wounds. In Julius Caesar, Antony promises to ‘put a tongue in every wound of Caesar’. Father Germano undertook a similar duty for Gemma. Meanwhile, his advice to the people around her was to keep her busy – plenty of manual ...”

“... can put their utterances through quality control first.’‘I remember crying when I read about Julius Caesar. His death. I always did whenever I read biographies. Because of course they all die. Thomas Alva Edison. Henry Ford. Benjamin Franklin. Marie Curie. Florence Nightingale. Winston Churchill. Louis Armstrong. Theodore Roosevelt.’‘You read ...”

“... how many cars there would be in a Missouri college town in 1917, or what rhetorical strategies Julius Caesar might employ in a letter to his niece.Nothing but the Night (1948), Williams’s slim first novel, now reprinted, isn’t like that. Williams never showed any interest in resurrecting it, and it isn’t hard to see the reason. Originally ...”

“... of Alexander was now finally at an end. Suddenly, everyone was writing like Xenophon again, or Julius Caesar. Consequently, apart from the citations by literary critics and a remarkable late inscription erected by the ruler of Commagene at Nemrut Dagh in Turkey, which makes even Hegesias seem pedestrian, next to nothing of this singular literary ...”

“... bowing and feasting, which leads from god-given Cyrus to our own anointed Queen, with Alexander, Julius Caesar and Byzantium acting as intermediaries. It could indeed be argued that the Persians laid the foundations for the Babylon of minorities and bickering diasporas – Greeks, Phoenicians, Syrians, Arabs, Jews – that somehow persisted in the ...”

“... the actor-servant is never entirely free from the suspicion that is allowed to surface in Octavius Caesar’s sceptical reaction: ‘O noble weakness!’ Cleopatra’s mastery of ‘excellent dissembling’ may have reduced Pompey, Julius Caesar and Antony in turn to the condition of ‘soldier-servant’, but it is the ...”

“... Mann, Döblin, Broch, Brecht – in which Fascism was allegorised into the past, as the rise of Julius Caesar, mobs howling for Augustus, or the killers of the Catholic League, in a deliberately modernising spirit completely at variance with the classical conception of the historical novel. If this was an enclave with few consequences, two works of the ...”

“... a Greek who wrote the first known account of ‘Britain’, and he is followed by Julius Caesar (100-44 BC, ‘politician, author and military commander’), one of the first to have thought it was time Britain joined the larger European community. While it is easy to see the merits of taking a fairly relaxed and inclusive view on the ...”

“... voodoo Macbeth in Harlem. Over the next few years, the Mercury Players would mount productions of Julius Caesar, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, The Cradle Will Rock, Danton’s Death and Native Son. Together with the Group Theater, they were the nerve power of the New York stage in the 1930s and early 1940s. There is a line more traceable than is sometimes ...”

“... deemed the most desirable of women, was the mother of four children, one, she claimed, by Julius Caesar and the three youngest by Mark Antony, something most representations of Cleopatra conspire not to remember or talk about (no one I have mentioned this to had the faintest idea she was a mother). In fact the silence began with Octavian in a bid ...”