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“... most famous bass-player of all – ahead even of such fancy fingerpickers as Jack Bruce or Mark King – because on a Hendrix record you can hear every note he plays – in the next room, and through the soles of your shoes. You might have gone to an Experience gig to see Hendrix set fire to his guitar; you also went to hear – no, to have your aorta ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... trifle.Stamps. Donald started a new album, ‘EGYPT’. On the first page, a collage of stamps of King Farouk, who, like Michael of Romania, was a boy at his accession. The stamps are the first issue of his reign, designed in 1937. Later in the album we find the revised design of 1944, by which time Farouk was 24 and ...”

“... and autumn of last year. The biographers are Norman Sherry, Anthony Mockler, Leopoldo Duran and Michael Shelden. The actual information they provide must by now be common knowledge among those who are at all interested in Greene, including those who have simply read the many highly communicative reviews, and in the basic respect of the facts imparted there ...”

“... them. It must also mean constant expectations and pressures that have constantly to be resisted. Michael Longley has acknowledged that a poet ‘would be inhuman if he did not respond to tragic events in his own community, and a poor artist if he did not seek to endorse that response imaginatively’ – and if the latter part of that sentence means ‘if he ...”

“... founder of Providence, Rhode Island), takes in memorials to Brigham Young, Martin Luther King and Thomas Merton, and ends at the grave of Thomas Jefferson – has a distinctly antiquarian flavour. Ruthven believes that myths ‘become plausible when canonised by arts that penetrate the collective cultural psyche’, and he seems happier visiting ...”

“... up with the petty feuds of office – which can be as contradictory as they are amusing. When Tom King came in as Secretary of State for Employment over Clark, the junior Minister bridled. He regarded his new master with contempt. This contempt continued until July 1989 when Clark read in the papers that King was to be ...”

“... The terms on which this book is set up are prefigured in the split title – Allen Lane: King Penguin. In Elizabethan drama the king’s two bodies might well be a theme for tragedy, and a latterday Lytton Strachey might have made much of the hypocritical discrepancies between public eminence and private person ...”

“... precedent that the House could make law without the participation of the House of Lords or of the king. He had established the right of electors to elect whomever they please and the principle that no constituency could be represented by anyone they had not elected. He had brought before the British public the injustices of the electoral system and the need ...”

“... the Atlantic than any other organisation. It was an embarrassing but hardly revelatory find: the king was the company’s titular governor and historians have long known of his shareholding. But it vividly illustrates the fact that the elite had a stake in the seamiest forms of overseas expansion.Because companies landed in unmapped and poorly understood ...”

“... royal marriage, the Princess Mary and her conservative supporters neatly sidestepped. Since the King could not be directly blamed for these upsets, those who disliked them (most people?) pointed the finger at his upstart ministers, and above all at Thomas Cromwell, whose personal role in ‘all this’ is still debated. The way in which the commotions began ...”

“... Yet the price paid for good sources at this stage of history is that they rarely agree. Take King Harold’s arrow in the eye, a central icon of English history. We have a number of accounts of his death, all of which differ. What may well be the earliest version (though not all historians agree) has him cut down by William himself, together with the ...”

“... it presented itself as the preserver of a hallowed constitution. It claimed to be fighting for ‘king and Parliament’, professed undying loyalty to Charles, and blamed the situation not on him but on evil advisers and established institutions. Those justifications were repeated regularly, if with diminishing conviction, throughout the war of 1642-46. Yet ...”

“... At the treason trials, the law officers claimed that the LCS was leading a plot to depose the King and usurp the powers of government, but the juries rejected this claim each time it was put before them, no doubt because it relied on arguments about what would count as usurpation and deposition which were figurative and technical to the point of ...”

“... Is there anything stranger than a pop star out of time? Before Elvis Presley, before Michael Jackson, there was Al Jolson – ‘the most popular entertainer of the first half of the 20th century,’ as Michael Rogin describes him. Eyes wide and mouth agape, arms outstretched and face painted black, Jolson concludes his performance in The Jazz Singer (1927) down on one knee, serenading the delighted actress who plays his mother in a voice as strong and piercing as a foghorn ...”