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“... the mew of a cat to the best music in the world. Wesley’s test for signs of spirituality in the king of beasts is not to be mocked in an age when cognitive ethologists are trying to discover whether animals have a sense of humour or can experience romantic love, and are fearlessly addressing queries such as: ‘Is it permissible to play music to dolphins as ...”

“... buys a car called a Steed, to remind you that he’s a bit of a Perceval, converses with a Fisher King called Boney Rasmussen, and meets an unfeasible number of women called Rose (Rosalinds are part of the landscape in woodland pastoral excursions). He also finds a manuscript by a writer of historical fiction called Fellowes Kraft. ‘They were popular ...”

“... lavish and well reproduced (with the sole exception of the portrait of the Moorish ambassador to Elizabeth I following preliminary page 64, a painting which hangs in the Shakespeare Institute and was long rumoured to have been the source for the cut of its former director Stanley Wells’s beard; for some reason this picture looks slightly out of focus, as ...”

“... an out-of-date beau and a not-yet-in-date subject of the once in a while and future king whom Henry James will christen Edward the Caresser. And at the centre of the novel is Professor Horace Nettleship, banked and glowering, a man whose geological hammer has chipped away his deity, and who is deep-seatedly obsessed with the monstrous ...”

“... on the other, revived a canonical story. Narrated by one of the wicked sisters, the book retold King Lear as a domestic tragicomedy. It remains her best work. Horse Heaven, like its immediate predecessors, treads a fine line between straightforwardly adopting and debunking the forms it appropriates. There is no plot as such, but by accommodating its ...”

“... of musicians and courtiers at Hampton Court. Negotiations broke down, and in November the king fled. By then Hesperides – which might partly have been designed as a bid for favour within that renewed royal household – was in press. It remained as a monument to the rapid fluctuations of its times. Herrick was the son of a wealthy London ...”

“... critics’ hostility. So, in a sense, did White: after his second novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, got even worse reviews, he abandoned experimentation. The imaginary straight author Will Wright flees to the suburbs and domesticity; the real gay author Edmund White fled to realism and domestic fiction. The literary world may have claimed to ...”

“... an uncommon name, and the playwright’s direct line died out in 1670 with his granddaughter Lady Elizabeth Barnard). The picture came into the family soon after the First World War, kindly provided by someone who couldn’t bear the idea that a modern-day William Shakespeare – whom she met, moreover, in her adopted home county of Warwickshire ...”

“... by a statement of intent. The essays concentrate on Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, King Lear and The Tempest. Greenblatt’s method is to juxtapose famous ‘literary’ texts with lesser-known, ‘non-literary’ texts, such as Jacques Duval’s Des Hermaphrodits (1603), Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (also ...”

“... days before Parliament demanded the seizure of all those who had sat in judgment on the former king. Harris’s novel begins with their arrival in America in July that year. Events in New England are interspersed with chapters imagining ministerial discussions in Whitehall, the plight of Goffe’s family in London and the arrest of fellow regicides on the ...”

“... a Washington Post reviewer compared The Brotherhood of the Grape to The Brothers Karamazov and King Lear. Hyperbole aside, both Fante’s early novels are excellent – especially Ask the Dust, which does indeed make good on at least some of the comparisons listed above. The narrator is Arturo Bandini, a young man from a poor Italian family who has moved ...”

“... Protestants, many puritans had unrealistic expectations of her successor. They therefore detested Elizabeth I’s church settlement of 1559, with its concessions to Lutherans and Catholics, including the requirements that ministers wear priestly vestments and accept Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. Church government was another bugbear. Allegiance ...”

“... least, the image of her husband – by her side for three reasons; first, he was already a titular king (of Sicily); second, as heir in his own right to the crown of Aragon, he had prospects of patronage and access to military clout; thirdly, and above all, he was the right sex. If one had to be a woman in the late Middle Ages, Spain was, relatively ...”

“... bringing to mind Max Miller’s celebrated appearance with a couple of potatoes – ‘King Edwards!’ – at the Royal Command Variety Performance. The potato became with great speed a staple food throughout Europe. It was greeted with especial enthusiasm in Ireland, where the moist climate is largely unsuited to the growing of wheat, and the ...”

“... and suborn themselves to your will? The real question of the relationship between the mad king and his clever, upright ministers is not about the abuse that the ministers suffer, or the justifications they give for sticking it out. It is about how the king manages to wring so much service out of them. Bolton’s ...”