“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the ‘Imperator’ and ‘Sâr’ (a title he claimed was bestowed on his family by a Babylonian king) of a Rosicrucian order called the Rose + Croix esthétique, which Satie joined as its in-house composer. For the inauguration of the Salon de la Rose + Croix, the order’s cultural wing, Satie composed three ‘Sonneries’ for trumpets and harps. No ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... demandingly, how it avoids invalidating itself. This shows up the advantage of the philosopher-king model, which can at least base its method of reaching political decisions on the philosophers’ claims to know best. Matters are made worse by the leaden style in which Between Facts and Norms is written. If poetry is what is lost in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... now remembered, between approximately 1848 and 1912 Rossetti was, in Whistler’s phrase, ‘a king’. And his imperium was very broad. It encompassed the leading intellectuals of the period as well as a popular audience created and nourished by many cultural entrepreneurs. As with Walter Scott and so many others, that success and influence would ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... poet Charles Bukowski mentioned his debt to Fante in his novel Women; Bukowski’s publisher, John Martin of the Black Sparrow Press, set about reprinting Fante’s books. Bukowski, who had been devoted to both books ‘like a man who had found gold in the city dump’ since discovering them by chance in the early 1950s, contributed an autobiographical preface ...”

“... into the water, without waiting for bridging gear. And when the counterblows came – the SS King Tiger tanks bursting through the pine trees and over the Soviet trenches – these men died where they stood. This is the story of two great offensives and a finale. As the world still remembers, the Red Army halted at the Vistula in autumn 1944, in order to ...”

“... Maugham and Julian Symons, just as Dumas, and Boublil and Schönberg, have pounced on the story of Martin Guerre, and Verlaine, Georg Trakl and Peter Handke, not to mention a dozen playwrights and film-makers, have taken up the tale of Kaspar Hauser. These days the celebrity machine has taken over the translation business: Bottom’s dream is acted out on Big ...”