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“... art student, was invading Selfridges in Oxford Street as a hanger-on to the English pro-situ group King Mob, proclaiming ‘Christmas: it was meant to be great but it’s horrible. Let’s smash the great deception. Light up Oxford St, dance around the fire.’ Situationism – a critique of culture as commodity, a strategy involving wit, irony and play – is ...”

“... without the Shakespeare. The Preface is all suspicious brevity on the matter: ‘We regret that Martin Gilbert was unable to come to the conference.’ Perhaps Gilbert was simply busy, or recuperating from a white-water rafting or a hang-gliding contretemps. But of course the words can also be interpreted to mean that Gilbert was invited, but not offered ...”

“... 12th century, on a church with its ‘boxes of gold and silver full of dead men’s bones’. A king might want to melt down that gold to pay soldiers. The wonder-seeking faithful prized the stuff inside: namely, dead bodies or pieces of them – bones, dust, scraps of blood-soaked cloth. So an even more puzzling question arises: why should the holy dead ...”

“... increase the differences between the two bodies. (Emily Dickinson in Winston Churchill’s body? Martin Amis in Joyce Carol Oates’s?) We can reduce the impact of a strange body by imagining that the overall chemistry of the transferred brain is essentially the same as in the old body (no strange hormonal rushes). Even so, there may be limits on how ...”

“... slaving expanded significantly during the 1660s, under the enthusiastic leadership of the new king, Charles II, and his brother, the future James II. In 1665, it was James’s eagerness to capture Dutch slave-trading forts on the West African coast that set off the second Anglo-Dutch war. In the last quarter of the century, English ships carried almost ...”

“... came closer than any previous demoniac to political power and the forces vying for it: the king, the diplomats of the Church, the aristocracy, the demagogues and the crowd. Fear of contagious mass enthusiasm meant that her time in Paris was spent in increasingly restricted spaces – private chapels and prison cells – where prelates and doctors ...”

“... printing press is displayed alongside a first edition of the Bible translated into German by Martin Luther. All of this testifies to a flourishing urban cultural life in the late medieval and early modern period. The Holy Roman Empire and its elaborate judicial, administrative and electoral institutions held things together only in a limited sense, as a ...”

“... a brilliant collection of short (and sometimes not so short) fictions, which remains, in its King Penguin edition, the most beautifully designed of his many beautifully designed books; and 1982, Janine, apparently Gray’s favourite among his own novels, and mine too. Janine is intimate rather than epic: it is written as an interior monologue, and this ...”

“... the fabular emphasis of the definite article – The Woman, The Tree, The Soldier, The Leaf, The King, The Rope – implies that Brecht and Beckett are in essence two sides of The Same Coin.Jameson’s core argument requires even more dialectical agility. He is excellent on the East Asian plays, noting Brecht’s tendency to take his oppressors from the ...”

“... It examines community (flagellants, holy anorexics) and singularity (Napoleon’s body, or Martin Luther’s). Its subject, most often, is language about the body; even when historians are talking about piss and shit and flesh they’re usually talking about words, which is understandable if frustrating.One problem is that it’s so easy to forget that ...”

“... facing certain death – watching their comrades sail away, yet bravely cheering ‘God Bless the King!’ It’s no surprise that The Wager is being made into a film by Martin Scorsese: it already reads like one (Killers of the Flower Moon is based on an earlier book by Grann).These impressive effects rely on some writerly ...”

“... made out. Desire for ever more amazing spectacles was universal, exemplified by the career of Martin Beckman, a Swedish mercenary tasked with arranging fireworks for Charles II’s coronation in 1661; he held the post of royal fire master for the next forty years. Unfazed by confessional differences, Beckman put on great shows that lightened the royal ...”

“... did not know that Franco would die in November. I did not know, nor did anybody else, that the new king was a democrat and took the view that democracy should not be introduced slowly but in one fell swoop. I did not know that within a year of Franco’s death the names of the streets in the old city would be put up in Catalan, the language he had banned, that ...”

“... out of starving Austria.Over the preceding years, Freud’s greatest anxiety had been for his sons Martin and Ernst, who had eagerly enlisted when war began (a third son, Oliver, rejected for active service, served as an army engineer). The dangers they faced at the front troubled his dreams. A nightmare in 1915 had as its manifest content ‘very clearly the ...”

“... the sheriff of Nottingham. Two figures stand between the sheriff and the poor. One is the absent king. He carries a monarch’s title, but exists only to represent benign authority, order and justice, the kinder, fairer authority that existed before he went away, naively leaving the sheriff to govern in his name and pervert his wishes, the same authority he ...”