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“... libels and if necessary buy up entire editions of the most outrageous of them. In 1779, the king’s ministers had paid the colossal sum of 192,000 livres to remove from circulation all the copies of a particularly vicious attack on Marie Antoinette published in London. Needless to say, this pay-off only increased the potential allure of such ...”

“... the composer Richard Rodgers (Rodgers and Hammerstein) in New York, she was invited to star in The King and I and did so at Drury Lane. Profumo did not immediately gain office when Churchill won the 1951 election, but a year later he became parliamentary undersecretary at the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation. While he was still at that ministry and ...”

“... The image of himself which Williams gives here is that of an innocent Rupert Pupkin. The fan in Martin Scorsese’s painfully funny The King of Comedy fantasises and ultimately kidnaps his way into the star’s backstage realm, with the aim of supplanting his idol; Williams, less ambitious, just wants to hang out ...”

“... dissimilar to the Land of Oz). One evening in Westwood Village, after seeing Scorsese’s film The King of Comedy, I noticed Steven Spielberg coralled by rain in the cinema foyer, preferring multiple recognition to getting wet on his way to the parking lot. Sunday jogging between the smoggy carriage-ways of San Vicente came to a halt, which must have been a ...”

“... it in 2018 for more than a million dollars. The blurbs from people like Gillian Flynn and Stephen King (‘stunning’, ‘gripping’, ‘brilliant’) led me to believe I was sitting down to a thriller, but there are no unexpected plot twists here. In a disclaimer, Russell says any similarities with her own upbringing – she grew up in Maine and withdrew ...”

“... 1890s, the larger than life Barney Barnato – a company promoter, banker and self-crowned diamond king – operated in the street outside the Stock Exchange, from which he was excluded. He inflated monstrous bubbles in South African mining shares before his preposterous empire collapsed and he made his leap into the Atlantic, just off Madeira. Kynaston ...”

“... questions. Economy of the Unlost is a compact yet supple series of essays (first aired in the Martin Classical Lectures series delivered annually at Oberlin College) complementing her previous long essay on a classical theme, Eros the Bittersweet (1986). Erudite and entertaining, effortlessly able to play across a range of associations, the book traces a ...”

“... particular, or it is a depiction of Chastity. All in all, it may be best to follow the example of Martin Kemp, whose 1981 study of the artist laconically captioned the painting Portrait of a Lady on a Balcony – though even this will not satisfy those denizens of the Mona Lisa websites and news groups who believe that she is really a man, and perhaps even ...”

“... Montaigne said, ‘that when we had hardly been a year wearing broadcloth at court in mourning for King Henry II, silks had already sunk so low in everyone’s opinion that if you saw anyone dressed in them you immediately set them down as a bourgeois.’ Though the copywriters would like to have us believe that one instinctively knows when something is ...”

“... In Martin Scorsese​ ’s film adaptation of The Age of Innocence, facsimiles of James Tissot’s paintings hang on the walls of the Beauforts’ Gilded Age mansion, the setting for the annual Opera Ball, where New York plutocrats dance with women in Tissot-inspired dresses. An oversized replica of Too Early (1873) shows the sniggering that meets a group of early arrivals at a ball ...”

“... Adventures of Augie March (his breakthrough virtuoso solo), Seize the Day and Henderson the Rain King, Bellow had hit the jackpot. The much coveted Bitch-Goddess of Success was now his sugar mama. ‘Guys, I’m rich,’ he declared, and told the poet Stanley Burnshaw that if the din from Herzog grew too loud, ‘I can always stuff my ears with ...”

“... the March on Washington, the Watts uprising and Vietnam, the moon landing and the assassination of Martin Luther King; whose inspiration for Xenogenesis, her great biopolitical trilogy of the 1980s, was both the then recent revelation that scientists had stolen cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks’s body without her ...”

“... ever seen. I text my friends a picture of it, to give them an idea of the infant’s proportions. King Baby, I call him, and steal looks at him throughout the flight; reassured, protected, in the presence of a monument.At the airport, I text my Lady’s Companion, my friend Hope. ‘Were you joking when you invited me to come with you to Rome?’ she wrote to ...”

“... writers and directors have never been westerners’? (Tell that to such sons of the pioneers as King Vidor and Sam Peckinpah.) Is it really the Western that is the paradigm of kitsch in Clement Greenberg’s famous 1939 essay? (I always assumed that the Trotskyite and Modernist Greenberg was attacking Stalin’s Socialist Realism.) Mitchell asserts that ...”

“... the mere process of joining up became a major hurdle. The clandestine volunteers were sent from King Street to the Comintern headquarters in Paris, and then down to Perpignan, egged on by the clenched fists of peasants and shadowed by the police. After hiding in the woods they had to walk over the Pyrenees, dodging the searchlights and bullets of French ...”