“... The Fellowship of the Ring appeared in July 1954, The Two Towers in November and The Return of the King almost a year later, in October 1955. Lewis wrote a dust-jacket puff: ‘No imaginary world has been projected which is at once so multifarious and so true to its inner laws.’ You do not have to admire the book to think that this was true. It is clear from ...”

“... more Don Ottavio than Don Giovanni – although he did play the latter on stage. According to Charles Rosen: ‘With his international reputation for erotic conquest already set’, Liszt must have known that the public would take Réminiscences de Don Juan (1841) ‘as a self-portrait in sound, just as everyone had assumed that Byron’s Don Juan was an ...”

“... autumn of 1938. Behind every teacher in every classroom in every school loomed a portrait of the king and a map of Greater Romania, the perfect circle within which, according to the curriculum and the powers that be, everybody lived happily doing various things in various sorts of traditional dress.In the sitting room at home, the man on the radio who ...”

“... Lionel Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel and Bertolt Brecht rubbed shoulders with Peter Lorre, Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht and Christopher Isherwood had briefly lived and worked in the cottage where I was pounding out the first draft of an adaptation in collaboration ...”

“... forced into a name change – it was banned by the French government for insulting the corpse of Charles de Gaulle. In a remarkable essay published in the Nouvel Observateur Roussel made two essential points. The first concerned French foreign policy: I don’t much like it when a head of state speaks of the dead as heroes. It usually happens because ...”

“... literature, fashion and food. By 1911, Henry Clay Frick had acquired Velázquez’s portrait of King Philip IV of Spain for $475,000, the highest price he had ever paid for a painting. William Randolph Hearst shipped over cartloads of hispano-moresque plates, furniture, choir screens, even entire cloisters for his new castle in California. As one Spanish ...”

“... her heart wasn’t in becoming a professional, and she never did. Even her two-part affair with King Farouk (the second instalment encouraged by Connolly) doesn’t put her in the professional category. There were no spectacular pickings. After leaving her father’s best friend Skelton earned her living by modelling for the London couturiers, and eked it ...”

“... of the ecclesiastical courts. Since he urged that these courts be brought under the control of the King in Parliament, More had to tread warily. The great question of the English Reformation, the royal claim to be supreme head of the Church in England, was at issue. He knew what might be in store for him in this world, and he feared what might be his lot in ...”

“... by serving as a tutor to the children of the prince-bishop of Lübeck, among them the future king of Sweden. He continued his own work, compiling lists of burned books (or books whose authors had been burned), which he intended to publish together under the title ‘Vulcan’s Library’.Research into intellectual auxiliaries has thrived in recent ...”

“... That, I suppose, is evident enough from Hill’s manner of procedure in such previous volumes as King Log and Mercian Hymns, but it feels particularly the case with his new poem. In an end-note he claims that ‘Péguy, stubborn ran-cours and mishaps and all, is one of the great souls, one of the great prophetic intelligences, of our century,’ and putting ...”

“... Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?’Once upon a time there was …        ‘A King!’ my little readers will say at once.        No, children, you are wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.All children, except one, grow up.All children grow up: those who write for children need, therefore, to write fiction that will ...”

“... were taken between 6.30 and 9 p.m., so major matters often weren’t debated until after midnight. Charles Forbes, MP for Malmesbury, complained in 1825 that ‘bills which concerned India were constantly introduced at a late period of the session and were regularly passed at a late hour of the night’. The Commons sometimes didn’t adjourn until four ...”

“... to the archives.2 Beside him are Thomas Sackville, earl of Dorset, and the earls and cousins Charles and Henry Howard. All three were Byrd’s patrons, and to various degrees shared the shifts and ambiguities of his religious convictions; it was odds-on that all of them would have conformed to a restoration of Catholicism in England if it had happened to ...”

“... tumult was especially consequential. At the end of February, after bitter fighting in the streets, King Louis Philippe, the beneficiary of the July Revolution of 1830, fled Paris. The resulting power vacuum was filled by a provisional government assembled in great haste from a list drawn up by newspaper editors and acclaimed by delirious crowds. A new ...”

“... newly added as a frontispiece to the Collected Poems, and its comic note: ‘The other man is Charles Coffin, a patient and understanding listener, as the picture shows. We would be discussing a 17th-century poet; I do not think I ever discussed my own poetry like that.’ Using Biography is devoted to six authors: Marvell, Dryden, Fielding, Yeats, Eliot ...”