“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and the ethnographic records in Western Europe. For instance, it has been established by Charles Phythian-Adams, in his splendid study of 15th and early 16th-century Coventry, Desolation of a City, that a division between home and workplace was so common in that city at that time that the absentee father can no longer be considered a product of ...”

“... Jesuit Desideri, who wrote about Lhasa in the early 18th century, and, in the 20th century, Sir Charles Bell and Hugh Richardson, British scholars and diplomats who both spoke Tibetan, and two Austrian mountaineers, Heinrich Harrer and Peter Aufschnaiter, who landed there for several years after escaping from British internment in India during World War ...”

“... a Free Commonwealth, at a time when preparations were already under way to welcome the returning Charles II. There are two elements, Milton asserts, in ‘the whole freedom of man’, one of which he describes as civil and the other as spiritual liberty. To enjoy these twin aspects of our freedom, we must be able to choose and act as we wish; we must never ...”

“... target was Burke as the author of Thoughts on the Present Discontents (1770), an attack on the King, or at any rate on the Palace, as seeking to influence, to frustrate and to corrupt Parliament through a cabal of secret and confidential advisers. This was an old charge with a complicated history: it owed something to Bolingbroke, whom Burke very ...”

“... treatment’. David himself was elected to the Convention in 1792 and voted for the death of the king. He took a leading part in the destruction of the Academy and was put on the Committee of General Security, the police committee which, even more than the Committee of Public Safety, was primarily responsible for the administration of the Terror. When the ...”

“... of Tartt’s: Bunny was Edmund Wilson’s nickname); Francis Abernathy is the wimp; and the twins, Charles and Camilla Macaulay, are the beauties. The members of the gang have no life outside their poses. There is nothing here unmotivated, no detail that is not telling (‘he carried an umbrella, a bizarre sight in Hampden’), no revelation that is not a ...”