“... Like​ the knives of Chinese jugglers’, Charles Bataille said of his friend Félix Nadar, ‘turbulent, unexpected, terrifying’. Adam Begley’s biography describes a life lived so frenetically, it’s surprising it lasted so long – Nadar died at the age of ninety, in 1910. Yet he is remembered today primarily for the stillness and serenity of his photographic portraits of 19th-century Parisian luminaries ...”

“... Court – this coffee house is adjacent to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and across the Charles River from the Business School. I did not take part in a political cabal, or think that one was being plotted around me, unless the normal conversation of Harvard elites counts as such. It did not occur to me that any of the discussions taking place might ...”

“... history’: a detailed study of the ways in which tattered texts that had belonged to one writer, Charles Lamb, won the passionate attention of American collectors and taught them new lessons about the hunt for old books.Broadway in the 1840s was already a hive of urban entertainments, from Niblo’s Garden theatre to P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, which ...”

“... and greed is more disquietingly shown in an adventure story like ‘The Man who would be King’ than it is in Conrad’s anti-Imperialist fables, because Kipling is on the side of Empire, not safely against it. But at the end of ‘The Man who would be King’ an emblem of Empire, the crown of gold and turquoise ...”

“... Noting Jack Lindsay’s statement that Bunyan’s The Holy War, published in 1682 near the end of Charles II’s reign, is a commentary on ‘absolutism against the liberties of the people’, Greaves asserts that this view ‘cannot be sustained’, but doesn’t explain why. Yet Sharon Achinstein, a scholar he cites elsewhere, has convincingly argued that ...”

“... and southern Netherlands in the years between 1550 and 1672, from the dreadful spoliations of Charles V and Philip II to the deadly invasion of Louis XIV, a period comprising the Great Dutch Revolt, under the Princes of Orange and Nassau, the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) that resulted in the independent Dutch Republic, and the infamous Thirty Years War ...”

“... There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face,’ said King Duncan in the fourth scene of Macbeth. But there was, and Shakespeare knew this. Almost at the moment he was writing the play, a new law required that anybody who professed ‘a knowledge of phisnognomie’ – one version of the name by which the practice of reading character in facial features was known to the learned – was to be ‘openly whipped untill his body be bloudye ...”

“... the scene here in 2000 BC, saying that people are looting and killing and nobody knows who the king is. So you see, nothing is new.’ Founded in 762 by the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur, Baghdad, situated on the Tigris and close to the Euphrates, was built on the site of older settlements that benefited from the region’s legendary fertility. Herodotus ...”

“... of Louis XVI felt they had been invited to become involved in national politics. By 1789 the king was bankrupt, and the normal avenues of reform exhausted; with the crown and the nobility at loggerheads, the state’s insolvency could not be fixed by fiscal austerity or constitutional tinkering. Instead the ...”

“... worked to consolidate the British presence in the Adriatic, training Greek mercenary regiments for King Ferdinando of the Two Sicilies and deploying them to fight brigands in Puglia – where brigandage was closely associated with subversive politics. When the Sicilian revolution broke out in 1820, Church – now leading the Neapolitan army – was a prime ...”

“... the basis of official records, for instance, is like using Hello! as a source for the history of Charles and Diana. In the chronicles, in the superscriptions of royal documents and in almost all the portraits, Isabella and her husband appear as united equals. The iconography is strewn with knots and yokes, images of connubial bliss and perfect union. ‘Each ...”

“... instead of my feet. My brothers hadn’t the same advantage.’ He hated disorder. His father, Charles Lutyens, was a horse painter of decreasing reputation (Lutyens had no pictures in his house when he first married so as not to have to hang any of his father’s) who became eccentric (dunking roast potatoes in tea) and parsimonious (using newspapers as ...”

“... it. There was a lot of glitter, hand sanitiser, and a samovar of tea. The show would open at the King’s Theatre in less than a week, yet the atmosphere was all laughter and promise.I have a thing for pantomime. I’ll spare you my theory that the best of it is better than King Lear and The Cherry Orchard put ...”

“... by the picture – which, as Unton put it, ‘did draw more speech and affection’ from the king than all his ‘best arguments and eloquence’.Novel techniques helped to intensify the effect of the portrait miniature. Hilliard used powdered gold to create a background of flames behind a lovestruck young man – the flames would have seemed to flicker ...”

“... convinced that item # 322 in Moore’s Checklist is spurious: that is, A History of the Wars of Charles XII. Their declared grounds are twofold: first, its totally unprofessional manner (‘everything in it bespeaks the amateur writer’); and second, its lack of general ideas (‘so intellectually vacant a chronicle’). Both views are critically ...”