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“... was to go to America to work with George Balanchine at the New York City Ballet. In a letter to Richard Buckle, Lincoln Kirstein described Nureyev ‘making peeeteeyous Russky noises’ about joining the company. But ‘Mrs K says defunutely: Nyet.’ The dance critics Arnold Haskell and John Martin denounced his ‘tragic’ mistake, his lamentable ...”

“... knew what to celebrate. At the start of the opening ceremony – a service in St Paul’s – the King praised the nation’s courage in the world wars; the official handbook declared categorically that ‘Britain is a Christian Community’; brightly coloured pavilions on the South Bank paid tribute to picturesque countryside, seaside holidays and an ...”

“... Nothing was worth saving, and Wisner began to build a new network. Then, on 23 August 1944, King Michael of Romania ended his alliance with Germany.Wisner was ordered to Bucharest to ‘establish the intentions of the Soviet Union regarding Romania’. An advance party of nine agents had been sent ahead of him, including Beverly Bowie, who achieved the ...”

“... and spit on the other children. 12 February. A shoddy programme about the conviction of Jonathan King for offences against young men dating back twenty-five years and more. While it features some of the police involved, it manages not to ask the pertinent question: if these 15-year-old boys had been 15-year-old girls and romping round in Rolls-Royces even ...”

“... series of eye-problems, partly the effects of undiagnosed porphyria, which eventually left the king blind. He was fascinated by the stage, and in the 1780s became drama critic for the Morning Post. He cultivated the friendship of actors, dramatists, theatre managers, with extraordinary assiduity; indeed, over a period of more than forty years he seems to ...”

“... Of the six plays which exist in forms such that authorial revision may be suspected, one – King Lear – is included in this edition in both variant forms. Hamlet might have been treated likewise but for considerations of space. The editors are here again acting on examined convictions, though admitting they may be wrong. And it is true that the plays ...”

“... lessons of Clarke, who had been found guilty of heresy, and to the reasoning of dissenters like Richard Baxter and Isaac Watts. For anyone who wishes to praise Johnson’s moral stature, the evasion is troublesome. Clergymen constantly taught that the morality practised by the ancients lacked the virtues inspired by Christianity. In one of his best ...”

“... the white man ‘their tenacity, if tragic, was remarkable.’ A sanguinary episode was ‘King Philip’s War’, in 1675, after which those of his followers who survived were sold into slavery, whether they had taken up arms or not, in the West Indies or Tangiers. ‘The North American mind was permanently affected’: the same pattern repeated ...”

“... objected to the price they had offered for his palm oil. Nana was forced into exile, just as King Jaja of Opobo had been in the 1880s. Jaja, a former slave, had developed a network of palm oil trading houses along the River Niger but in a fit of overconfidence he had attempted to bypass the Royal Niger Company and sell directly to merchants in ...”

“... to the art critic Bernard Berenson, which have been edited with unobtrusive wit and erudition by Richard Davenport-Hines.* During the Suez crisis of 1956 Trevor-Roper concluded that ‘there is in England, as in other countries, a fascist world: the world of lower-middle-class conservatives who have no intelligence but a deep belief in violence as a sign of ...”

“... endles space of eternite’. Life was lived somewhere in-between. The Northamptonshire landowner Richard Hotot gives a sense of time’s fractured geometry, dating a book to ‘the 33rd year of King Henry [III] son of King John, which is 5448 years from the beginning of the world, 1249 ...”

“... was cycled back into art – think of the lush bits of cited advertisements in paintings by Richard Hamilton or James Rosenquist – and the two-way traffic has continued ever since. Then, too, there is the notion of the artist as showman. Art-world impresarios existed before Surrealism – Marinetti qualifies, as does Tzara, not to ...”

“... laureate and historiographer royal was vital to him, as was his income as a shareholder in the king’s theatre company. Money was tight after the Theatre Royal burned down in 1672, and again in 1689, when he was sacked from his official posts because he was a Catholic: translating Virgil appealed to him not only for artistic reasons but as a source of ...”

“... in the world of the medical quacks: James Graham, for example, offered his ‘celestial bed’, a king-sized arena of sexual delight, to voluptuaries (so said his enemies) or to infertile couples (so said he, not a little disingenuously). The steep price of bliss kept the bed out of wide circulation. Sexual knowledge in the Enlightenment is, within its ...”

“... much ambiguity – she wanted to kill him, and not quickly.’ Miranda Seymour (no relation) and Richard Perceval Graves (the poet’s nephew) present Amy Graves in less hysterical terms, but agree that her rigid notions of purity helped inculcate Graves’s sexual difficulties. When on holiday with his family in Brussels in 1912, a young Irish girl staying ...”