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“... and with which he identified his hapless country-men. One of the most bizarre moments in The Last King of Scotland occurs when the narrator, Nicholas Garrigan, is picnicking out in the hills with his Israeli girlfriend, Sara: as if from nowhere a detachment of soldiers in full Scottish paraphernalia – kilts, sporrans, white-and-red chequered gaiters, drums ...”

“... them? In the course of twenty years in the mid-19th century a group of British explorers – Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, David Livingstone, Samuel Baker (with his wife, Florence), Henry Morton Stanley and James Grant – slogged out on their respective expeditions through East and Central Africa, and engaged in an intense and bitter battle over ...”

“... pot never boils’. No one can wholly avoid hating ‘Old Daddy Franklin’, from whose Poor Richard’s Almanac these sayings come, especially if brought up to revere him in Public School, USA. Abraham Lincoln is the father of his people; George Washington, of his nation; but Benjamin Franklin – as it happens, a basically very decent man – hovers ...”

“... I recently attended a lavish production of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome at the Staatsoper in Vienna. Directed by Boleslav Barlog, sung by the diva Mara Zampieri, and staged, in keeping with Beardsley’s erotic drawings, by Jürgen Rose, it was a feast for eye and ear. And yet as I crossed the road to the Cafè Sacher afterwards I wondered how successful the performance had really been ...”

“... When​ Richard Wright sailed to France in 1946, he was 38 years old and already a legend. He was America’s most famous black writer, the author of two books hailed as classics the moment they were published: the 1940 novel Native Son and the 1945 memoir Black Boy. By ‘choosing exile’, as he put it, he hoped both to free himself from American racism and to put an ocean between himself and the Communist Party of the United States, in which he’d first come to prominence as a writer of proletarian fiction only to find himself accused of subversive, Trotskyist tendencies ...”

“... being physically part of an audience, the more essential distances are decently maintained). Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria built a private playhouse so that he could watch Wagner’s operas quite alone; today, every owner of a television set enjoys a similar privilege. Indeed, one’s privilege is greater, for though the paranoid Ludwig could isolate himself ...”

“... Shapiro found it ‘the best aide’s-eye view of politics since Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men’. In the New Republic, Matthew Cooper, after revealing (‘full disclosure’) that he himself is now dating Mandy Grunwald, who held the position in the Clinton campaign of the novel’s sexy heroine Daisy Green, says that ‘finally the modern ...”

“... followed his lead, so Lilith is ‘the lamia’ in the Geneva Bible and a ‘screech owl’ in the King James Version. The New International Version has ‘night creature’, which is a pretty bland way to describe a murderous demon. Nowhere is she described as a flatfish, however.The verse from Isaiah indicates that Lilith belongs to a wild place. To banish ...”

“... and interests ran in close parallel from their first meeting, around 1930. Duchamp’s ‘The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes’ (1912). If Duchamp was ‘Dada’s Daddy’, as the critic Winthrop Sargeant proposed in Life magazine in 1952, then Dalí (17 years his junior) was Dada’s deranged and errant offspring. Both artists played up to ...”

“... and ‘Independent’ in the old carefree way. Three years later followed The Reign of King Pym, a masterly study of Parliamentary politics during the early years of the English Revolution which has dominated historical thinking ever since. In 1952, he published More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea, a competent but not epoch-making work. Since ...”

“... undiscovered Southern continent – really existed; if it did, to take possession in the name of King George III; and if it didn’t, to plant the flag on whatever still unknown lands were encountered in the circumnavigation.The Royal Society would organise the astronomy, securing a grant from the king to pay for it; the ...”

“... texts written by men who lived in the time of Alexander or knew someone who had. Soon after the King’s death, little tracts appeared. In ‘The Last Days of Alexander and Hephaestion’, Ephippus described the drunken excesses of Alexander and his ‘best friend’ on their return from India, how Alexander liked to dress up as a god, wearing the ram’s ...”

“... R. Ford, President of the United States . . . do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offences against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974. Nixon himself had ...”

“... little bells’) – was composed at Meung. In 1461, having obtained a royal pardon when the new king rode through Orléans, Villon returned to Paris. The ‘Testament’ was written here, ‘en l’ an de mon trentiesme age’. It’s richer and longer than the ‘Legacy’, full of lower blows and better comedy, but its worldliness is offset by the ...”

“... and cushions piled high on the stone and sand of the quarry to create a luxurious court. A king and his entourage loll back, enjoying a witty puppet-show produced from behind a multi-coloured cloth. The puppet seems to run amok, stealing kisses from the ladies. It’s all very relaxed, recalling the convivial atmosphere of the court entertainment in A ...”