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“... were beginning their work, there appeared in print a brief Oriental story about three sons of the King of Serendip, who could tell the identity of a lost animal simply by reading its tracks. Tried as wizards, the three brothers successfully demonstrated the method they used and escaped punishment. The same story was told in the 18th century, prompting Horace ...”

“... K’ang-Hsi, a contemporary of Louis XIV (although by K’ang-Hsi’s imperial standards the Sun King was a mere barbarian princeling). The book is not a biography but a portrait, indeed a kind of self-portrait, an attempt to explore K’ang-Hsi’s mind by making a kind of jigsaw or mosaic of the Emperor’s personal opinions, which are to be found ...”

“... the spirit of the Protestant apprentice boys who had shut the gates of Derry in the face of King James. This retrenchment had the effect of removing from Protestant identity the level of political allegiance and negotiation. Any reform was, and still is, construed as an immediate threat to fundamental values. Addressing an Ulster Unionist Convention in ...”

“... Vol. 6, No 2 of the London Review of Books, we read of similar beliefs in 17th-century Italy, when Anthony Pagden discussed The Night Battles by Carlo Ginzburg. Hearing of this night life in the Ivory Coast, Naipaul was reminded of the beliefs and customs of black slaves in old Trinidad. ‘A king of the night, a slave by ...”

“... he had just sent off to the publisher). He is reverting in Bouvard et Pécuchet to the role of St Anthony, with the prolonged ascesis of the book’s gestation finding its reward in the encyclopedic range of the contents and in the particularity with which Flaubert is able to mock the efforts of his two boobies, along with the whole way of life of the society ...”

“... or Schröder of Eastern Europe, but his failed modernisation project – supposedly inspired by Anthony Giddens – and bribery scandals involving both socialists and liberals, led people instead to equate the left with capitalism and corruption. Every Saturday, menacing groups of men, young and old, dressed in black would gather outside parliament to blast ...”

“... world. One might think that with all this a modern biographer couldn’t help but succeed, much as Anthony Everitt recently succeeded with Cicero, the Roman orator who seemed to Plutarch to have been fashioned by Nature as a duplicate of Demosthenes the Athenian. It’s not as easy as that, however. Nearly everything said about Demosthenes by his ...”

“... provided material for such distinguished hams as Jason Robards, Rip Torn, Philip Baker Hall and Anthony Hopkins. Feeney contends that Nixon had a unique capacity among US presidents for constructing narratives around himself. He renames Nixon’s memoir, Six Crises, ‘Six Star Turns’, and notes that its subject ‘presents himself throughout as if he ...”

“... more than enough to set alarm bells ringing about US imperial intentions. It is remarkable that Anthony Eden agreed to join in with the Suez operation, for it meant deliberately deceiving the US and undermining the Anglo-American alliance. The French warships that were secretly in Israeli ports had to be kept out of sight of the US Sixth Fleet in the ...”

“... of Charles II, and though one would be hard put to find much resemblance between the ‘Church and King’ Tories and the rabble who contested the leadership of the Conservative Party last year, it is without question the most successful political party in modern European history.Sometimes it has been a force of reaction, in the spirit of Lord Salisbury, a ...”

“... his own on a more tyrannical and limited pattern. In The Valley of Bones and The Soldier’s Art Anthony Powell’s ineffectual Welsh captain also organises his internal speech consciousness on a Kipling model.But, as Raine emphasises, the area Kipling covers is incredibly wide. It is actually a great deal wider than that of Dickens, who, in spite of the ...”

“... later Elizabethan churchmen had viewed the Presbyterian threat and the prospect of a Scottish king as head of the Church of England, but there was less need for nerves after 1604, when the esteem of bishops seems to have risen among the laity. The troubled Parliaments of the 1620s produced no challenge to the episcopal office. If the term ...”

“... on the railways. No, 350,000 German soldiers, said Colonel Driscoll DSO, working as moles. The King spoke of his nephew the Kaiser planning to land an army corps and proclaim that, as a grandson of Queen Victoria, he was ready to free the King from ‘the Socialistic gang which is ruining the country’; Parliament voted ...”

“... Amis has been encased in an obese 995 pages from Zachary Leader.Hilary Spurling’s Life of Anthony Powell breaks with this pattern. The longest-lived of all significant novelists of the last century, his 94 years are covered in fewer than 450 pages of text. In part, that’s because she confines the final quarter of his life to the briefest of ...”

“... for her mother’s work, was born in 1957, a year after Brophy published her second novel, The King of a Rainy Country, an ‘autobiography or fake autobiography’ in which young Londoners take a road trip to Venice (it will appear from McNally Editions next year).Murdoch was supportive of Brophy’s books, which is more than you can say of Brophy, who ...”