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“... waist, Henry VIII was fat, they thought twice about saying so and in Holbein’s portraits of the king his bulk is translated into an image of monumentality and strength. The female pharaoh Hatshepsut was portrayed in sculpture as slender with delicate features. The discovery in 2007 of her long-lost mummy revealed that she was enormously fat. At the heart of ...”

“... of Aragon and so fell from favour, Cromwell somehow managed seamlessly to enter the service of the king. He eventually came to fill much of the large gap left by the portly cardinal, from whom he learned a number of tricks for reconciling the law to the will of the king. No one understands exactly how the son of a blacksmith ...”

“... corpulent and sagging, takes in the spectacle, flanked by his bride, dark-eyed Herodias. The king’s rheumy gaze is fixed on his stepdaughter’s nakedness. In the corner, a kneeling servant proffers Salome’s reward, chosen at her mother’s behest: the severed head of John the Baptist, gory and ragged, already ...”

“... Philippe de Champaigne gave when his daughter became a Jansenist nun – a Mary Magdalene and a John the Baptist – are in the exhibition. Neil MacGregor’s catalogue notes shed light on the choice of saints and make sense of their decorous presentation and of the place art could have among the spiritually frugal. St ...”

“... about the best state of a commonwealth in one of his epigrams (it goes roughly: ‘do we want a king or a Senate? – hang on, if we have the power to answer this question then we must already be kings; and if we are not kings we’d better shut up and stay out of polities’). In another he writes movingly to his children while absent from them on royal ...”

“... to us but which were nothing to be ashamed of in the 1780s and 90s – gluttony, for instance. John Beresford, who edited the Diary just after the First World War, sees it all quite differently, and his Introduction and Notes are a period piece in themselves. For Beresford, the Norfolk parson was ‘that very rare and beautiful bird – a typical ...”

“... now doing less. In particular, the excellence of the BBC has broken down. The former BBC executive John Gau has alleged, in these columns, a monopolistic, dinosauric gigantism. And as Gau conveyed, this tendency is linked to a reluctance to risk the unpopular and the unusual (as distinct from the routinely scandalous and untoward) in giving opportunities to ...”

“... Spirits’. Empson’s fullest exploration of this subject remained unfinished. The editor, John Haffenden, has stitched together the various drafts that he left behind and has given the somewhat unwieldy result the title ‘The Spirits of the Dream’. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck meets a fairy in the Athenian wood and asks her where she is ...”

“... revolutionary dead – has strongly Catholic roots. But the main point of the essay is simply that John Paul II entirely deserved the historic come-uppance he received in Managua. The Pope, characteristically enough, went out of his way to declare his special affection for Cardinal Obando, who has been tougher in his opposition to the Sandinistas than he ever ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... where he could hardly bear to hear Italian spoken. Similarly, an already dicey relationship with John Foster Dulles seems to have been ruined beyond repair by Dulles’s hand-on-arm habits and his halitosis. There were otherwise unexplained enmities towards Eden throughout his career which were surely based on the belief that he was gay, but since ...”

“... main liberal demands. The gambit might well have worked, but it was blocked by the chief of the king’s military cabinet. Bismarck immediately saw that the key to solving the crisis was no longer to secure a deal between parliament and Crown, but rather to eliminate all possible rivals for the king’s confidence. He ...”

“... first words to the policeman who wrestled him to the ground were: ‘Did I get him, did I get the king?’ His defence counsel Thomas Erskine, the Whig MP who had faced down Pitt’s government in the treason trials of 1794, disputed none of the facts but argued for dismissal even so. Hadfield had been under the illusion that he was God’s instrument, and ...”

“... In the​ cold autumn of 1643 Susan Rodway wrote to ‘my king love’, her husband Robert. A candlemaker by trade, he was away fighting for Parliament and she hadn’t heard much from him, unlike her neighbours in the London parish of St Dunstan-in-the-West who all had news from their husbands. Their daughter, Hester, was just a baby and their young son, Willie, was sick ...”

“... McFarlane to contribute to his biographical series ‘Teach Yourself History’ a short book on John Wyclif, an Oxford intellectual dead for six hundred years and the only arch-heretic bred in Catholic England before the Tudors and the Reformation. In one way this wasn’t surprising, since Rowse and McFarlane were friends. But in another way it was, since ...”