“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it’s hard to live up to. In the movie, Victor and his father are portrayed by Oscar Isaac and Charles Dance. They play, perfectly, the classic Oedipal parts of brilliant bullied child and impatient, self-admiring father. And they lead us into those zones of the monster myth del Toro is most interested in: the tendencies of geniuses to be unhappy with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... technological development essential to the rise of tennis was the discovery of vulcanisation by Charles Goodyear in 1844, which allowed for the production of bouncier balls than the hair-filled ones used in real tennis. ‘When a cut lawn and a soft rubber ball were eventually put together,’ Berry writes, ‘lawn tennis became inevitable and, because it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... two weeks before his death (1955). 'Portrait of Charlie Parker' by Beauford Delaney (1968). 'Charles the First' by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1982). Charlie Parker at a photomat, Kansas City (1940).PreviousNext William Burroughs said that you should never trust anyone who looked the same from photo to photo; Parker can appear a wholly different person across ...”

“... living novelist versus Britain’s greatest ever novelist as if it were a literary Godzilla meets King Kong. Ackroyd understands Dickens better than pettifogging academics because Ackroyd, like his subject, is a creative genius, and such minds are privileged to think alike. Ackroyd himself makes this claim, if rather more tactfully than his ...”

“... right. Her book focuses on two commercial marriage brokers, Villiaume and his starchier successor Charles de Foy. The two differed in demeanour, strategy and approach, each seeming to personify his respective era. Their activities made them famous but also turned them into subjects of satire; they were attacked by competitors and disgruntled ...”