“... than ‘outrageous’ (the blurb’s word), will fill us with a gloom like that discerned by Martin Scorsese in the worn features of the aging funnyman played by Jerry Lewis in his splendid recent film King of Comedy. The stories in Italo Calvino’s Marcovaldo (1963), a collection of 20 urban fables occupying a point ...”

“... if one says – and nearly every reviewer says this kind of thing at least once a week – that King Lear is a good play and The Four Just Men is a good thriller, what meaning is there in the word “good”?’ His real beef was that too regular, too poorly paid employment could turn good reviewers bad. Cut to the present day: ‘In a cold but stuffy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... College, the site of his earlier joke about the horse that goes round and round the statue of King Billy on College Green. Apart from its obvious use as an image of political paralysis, the obsessive circular motion refers us back to Ferguson again, who wrote an essay ‘On the Ceremonial Turn, Called Desiul’. This is the Irish word ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... one described it as Newsom’s ‘I was born a poor Black child’ story, after the Steve Martin monologue in The Jerk. Newsom insists that his home life was straitened – he ate too much macaroni cheese on his own, and it made him anxious when his mother complained about money. At the same time, he knows the story is complicated: he also went on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... And what will the succession be?People tell you in Grimsby there was only one power: that fish was king, and that it didn’t abdicate, it was overthrown by foreigners. Once, the world’s largest ice factory would turn out gargantuan ice blocks to be crushed by the ton, carried on conveyors to the dockside and poured from chutes into the holds of the ...”

“... into accepting real wage cuts while refusing to take money wage cuts. More moderately, Mervyn King of the Bank of England devoted part of this year’s ESRC lecture, and an article in the Guardian, to warning against Akerlof, because although there was no evidence on the question either way, ‘monetary stability would surely do more good than ...”

“... David Fieldhouse examines how far it promoted economic development or under-development. Ged Martin and Benjamin Kline discuss emigration and identities. John MacKenzie supplies a piece on imperial art. Finally, Marshall, followed by an Australian, an African and an Indian, offer their own, inevitably different, verdicts on Empire’s ...”

“... Himself.’ Chesterton saw a banner hanging between two tenement houses: ‘God Bless Christ the King,’ it said. From then on an authoritarian Church and a fragile, insecure State combined to produce a sort of dark ages. It was as though Ireland north and south vied with each other over who could produce the most sectarian state. Censorship, mass ...”