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“... ni musique, défilent lentement dans mon âme’). This is what for Baudelaire it is like to be king of the rainy country, ‘jeune et pourtant très-vieux’. It is the outcome of an experiment on the mind and the body designed to go wrong, a ceaseless dicing with danger. If the past is a cupboard full of skeletons and ghosts, Time is the avid gambler ...”

“... As gravity bends light, so power bends time,’ Christopher Clark writes. The ‘temporal turn’, which has recently become fashionable among historians, looks at the interplay between an individual’s subjective experience of the world and the temporal systems that surround them. These systems are generated, on the one hand, by the infrastructure of modernity – clocks, railways, the internet – and, on the other, by ideas about stasis and change, and the past, present and future ...”

“... chat-show host, star of a series of travel documentaries, essayist, lyricist: he was for a time a king of all media, even publishing a bestselling novel, Brilliant Creatures, in 1983. His shtick – part rough diamond, part name-dropping highbrow, part fast-talking joker, part self-delighting goon, with a dry, singsong Aussie delivery – was something you ...”

“... history of ideologically inspired violence: the names and causes change, the atrocities don’t. Christopher Tyerman exercises self-discipline in leaving to the last page of his text any explicit comparison between the Middle East in 1099 and in 2015. But on his very first page he introduces us to the Crusades as having their own, medieval Christian ...”

“... throughout along working life could juxtapose so simply and movingly Gloucester and Edgar in King Lear – ‘Alack I have no eyes’ ... ‘Ripeness is all’ – with a near-blind old woman’s venture down the garden and into the copse, her last flight from ...”

“... on three explosive issues almost simultaneously. There was the situation in Jordan, where King Hussein was confronting not only the rebellious Palestinian element in his own country but also the threats of his bellicose neighbours, Iraq and Syria. There was the clumsily surreptitious attempt by the Soviet Union to establish a nuclear submarine base in ...”

“... elegiac fondness for the Prussian past. Pinning down what Fontane meant takes us to the heart of Christopher Clark’s lively and thoughtful book. His clear-eyed account hinges on the idea that the essence of the Prussian tradition was the absence of tradition. It is not hard to see how that quality might have impressed a 19th-century observer like ...”

“... licenses. He had always defended civil rights and had entertained Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King in Chicago. Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald had performed on his TV show, which was subsequently censored in the South. Fanned by the permissive zeitgeist, the Playboy Clubs proliferated fast. Several had opened by ...”

“... account of the annual Bakhtiari migration made by an American woman spy and the future creators of King Kong. The Bakhtiari tribes present, in Curzon’s words, one of the unsolved ‘riddles of history’. Fractured into numerous divisions and subdivisions, they straddle the Zagros mountains, Iran’s natural frontier to the west, and scholars are divided ...”

“... Future historians looking back at the Rodney King insurrection in South Central Los Angeles will not see (or not just see) another in the line of racial explosions which go back through Watts, the Zoot Suit riots, to the ‘Yellow Peril’ pogroms of the early 20th century. What distinguishes this particular affray by (and against) a Californian ethnic minority is that it was the first such to be entirely and comprehensively covered by television ...”

“... Joined by many from the city, they sacked John of Gaunt’s palace of the Savoy and forced the king, the 14-year-old Richard II, to meet them at Mile End. There, on 14 June, Richard made major concessions, the most important being the abolition of villeinage. While negotiations were going on at Mile End, another group of rebels dragged the archbishop of ...”

“... A fathead is stupid but a fat cheque is welcome. A fat chance is smaller than a slim chance. Christopher Forth begins his inquiries at the most visceral level, by considering responses to the substance of fat both in and out of the body. It is, he suggests, the capacity of fat to be both in and out that contributes to the widely varying attitudes to ...”

“... and masterminding the laws which made the Church of England autonomous and subject only to the king as its supreme head, established for all time to come the sovereignty of statute law, and therefore of Parliament, the maker of statutes (not forgetting that the king was a member of Parliament, never, as Henry VIII ...”

“... the History of the Pleas of the Crown that ‘because as the subject hath his protection from the King and his laws, so on the other side the subject is bound by his allegiance to be true and faithful to the King’. This legal contention was binding on all Britons at all times during their lives. Whether Philby was ...”

“... political connotations. The cry ‘Long live Pius IX!’ soon morphed into ‘Long live Pius IX, king of Italy!’ and to this was soon added ‘Death to the Austrians!’ or even ‘Death to the Pope’s evil advisers!’ Then, on the evening of Tuesday, 7 September 1847, the crowds who had converged on the residence of the Tuscan legation to cheer Duke ...”