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“... is cut up like a bullock at Smith field,’ he merely commented that he had now seen a king beheaded and that king avenged. Many other sights were to drive him to anger or disgust, but in this entry he was being studiously hard-boiled, as if with an eye to leaving a crisp morsel for the historian. In his 1974 ...”

“... aristocracy has always been hard to draw, and perhaps never more so than in the case of John Charles Wallop, third Earl of Portsmouth. Born in 1767 at the family’s Hampshire residence of Hurstbourne Park, Wallop grew into a child who betrayed signs of being what his contemporaries would have called a simpleton. He was sent to be tutored by the ...”

“... diversion on some alien visitor dropping in to have their theological doctrines explained to him. Charles Rowcroft’s ideal world in The Triumph of Woman (1848) is a drearily high-minded regime full of wholesome puddings, docile, state-funded artists and one pew per person in church. The space-travelling protagonist, who lands in Bavaria by ...”

“... ever to feel quite comfortable with it. Take even so central an event as the execution of the King. As Conor Cruise O’Brien points out, for anyone committed to the notion of popular sovereignty the very existence of a king was an attack on all one held most dear, a crime against the nation – the ...”

“... and, in doing so, achieves a querulous irony. Worstward Ho – the title puts us in mind of Charles Kingsley’s stirring adventure yarn, and perhaps of Kipling’s boarding-school, model for Stalky and Co. Shorn of the exclamation-mark which gives a stirring emphasis to the Victorian adventure story (and the name of the Victorian school), Worstward Ho ...”

“... in a mere ninety minutes. Among the Hungarian dead lay seven bishops, a swag of barons, and the king. The twenty-year-old Hungarian sovereign, Louis II, had fallen from his horse as he fled the battlefield and drowned in a shallow stream – a quiet death that fuelled conspiracy theories for centuries to come. The death of the heirless ...”

“... he had the kind of background Channon yearned for: a Nicolson baronetcy had been created by Charles I, and on his mother’s side he was related to the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. Where some people reinvent themselves to disguise a lowly upbringing, Channon tried desperately to shed his origins as the son of a rich shipowner – ‘I have put my whole ...”

“... in strength throughout the 1300s. Already in the 1380s, a group of embroiderers petitioned the king as ‘les Brouderers de la Citye de Londres’. In 1495, perhaps in response to undercutting, the Broderers petitioned to the mayor and aldermen of London that no citizen embroiderer should employ a foreign craftsman, except if granted permission from the ...”

“... question is why the admired court jester would want to write a sardonic script about the king.)Mank is supposed to stay off the booze, which isn’t going to happen. He can’t do much gambling in these isolated quarters, but we see plenty of it in flashbacks, and indeed in what is the best of the film’s several set-pieces. The year is 1934 and ...”

“... the future mother: it seems that coming upon it has been his first intimation of the good news (in Charles Addams’s cartoon the father-to-be greets with similar enthusiasm the mother-to-be knitting a many-limbed garment). Among the most refined pieces of stitching shown here – thin muslin and transparent cotton with embroidery as delicate as insect wings ...”

“... combines politics with reflections on the place of education in public life. In one play the King of Navarre is whimsically transformed into a bachelor and rechristened Ferdinand; he retreats from court not for fear of Spanish-funded Catholic plots but to lead a quartet of abstemious students. He experiences a crisis of conscience at breaking an ...”

“... world. Recognising that he could have IP with world-changing possibilities, Hooke went to see the King and asked him for a patent – that’s how you could secure your rights to IP in Restoration England, though it was more customary to work through Crown officials. Hooke gave the King an early version of his watch and ...”

“... by ‘the best Masters’ of the day, artists such as Francis Barlow and the French academicians Charles Le Brun and Le Clerc) while framing the task as fundamentally accessible: ‘Made easier to the comprehension of Beginners than any book of this kind hitherto made publick.’ The copy from 1755 I looked at had the signature ‘Eliza Danby’ written ...”

“... 1957 exegesis of the monarch’s ‘two bodies’ and the political theology of the king’s person as an incarnation of the state. Recently, however, voices have been raised in dissent against the swollen ‘body’ industry, notably by Terry Eagleton, for whom the endless discussion of the body remains a tiresome and dubiously fruitful ...”

“... went to see him in his flat in the Albany and recognised an oil painting by the Punch illustrator Charles Keene. He confirmed Clark in his new regard for him when he pointed out – had Clark not known or was he just impressed that a man from New Zealand might know too? – that St Paul’s was built on a Gothic plan and went on to describe the figures in a ...”