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“... best-edited of novels. On page ten the lovers are discovered on a June afternoon: ‘the bed is king-sized, with a white padded headboard and matching white bedside cupboards.’ On page 14 it is the same afternoon, the bed is still king-size and the lovers are still in it: but the bedside tables are now mahogany and ...”

“... are bombarded not with useful news but with junk about how the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques (King Fahd) has received a message from the President of Djibouti. Realism is at a premium, and three months after the arrival of US troops King Fahd still talks about ‘Arab and friendly forces’ as if most of the soldiers ...”

“... prototype. While modern French scholarship busies itself with probing the dreams of the poem’s king in order to uncover a ‘feudal libido’, can we recapture the dreams that troubled the original Charlemagne (a light sleeper, as it happens)? Already in the Early Medieval period people were in the business of making images for themselves and investing ...”

“... young Prince Charles, and must have impressed him because he was appointed the first Master of the King’s Musick in 1625, on the death of James I. Like his father, Charles was very interested in the arts (he had been well tutored by the Duke of Buckingham), and in ambition he far outstripped him. Soon after the funeral, Charles sent Lanier to Italy to ...”

“... not be expected to lie awake pondering the logical status of such propositions as ‘the present king of France is bald.’ Despite his dependence on women he accused the whole sex of ‘triviality of soul’. In his letters he spoke copiously and freely to a great many correspondents. It is hard to read the dozens of amorous effusions here quoted without ...”

“... come as no surprise, but you would probably not expect an Orestes to revolve around a plot to kill Helen of Troy, or a play called Helen to open in Egypt or an Iphigeneia in the Ukraine. And who could have anticipated that a Phoenician Women, for god’s sake, would conceal yet another play about incestuous Thebes, or that ...”

“... the death of Louis? Couldn’t he have intervened to arrest the chain of events that had led the king inexorably to the guillotine? In the summer of 1792, with the Austrian and Prussian armies massing on the borders of France, threatening to invade in order to restore Louis to all the ‘legitimate authority’ he had exercised before the Revolution, the ...”

“... a pair of genuinely nasty Furies, a clown, some melodious harvesters, and a strange talking head. Helen Cooper mentions Peele’s play glancingly on two occasions, describing it as ‘a compendium of everyone’s favourite motifs from popular romance and folk tale’. That implies a generic distinction between the two forms. But romance, whether popular or ...”

“... the prompting of the popular press and an anonymous letter to Lord Bute led to a pension from the king in 1762. Too poor to complete his Oxford degree though more learned than his tutor, Johnson, like Richard Savage, his friend and the subject of his first biography, ‘having no profession, became by necessity an author’. Johnson begins his Life of ...”

“... trying to trace any living relatives and get them to answer the question ‘Who Am I?’ Granny Helen, having already entered the fog belt of Alzheimer’s, wasn’t up to the task. Next to her name, Joss has noted: ‘Granny doesn’t feel like writing.’I was always secretly furious with my father for not telling me his story (I still am, except it’s ...”

“... the best essays in this book deals with the night scene in Henry V. On the eve of Agincourt, the King, disguised, moves among the common soldiers and is drawn into an argument about the war in which they are all engaged. It is a scene from which, through the centuries, commentators have flinched. The truth is that we are not given what we expect and desire ...”

“... end of the town without consulting him. She never comes back. It is shrugged off very casually: King John (somebody told me) Said to a man he knew: ‘If people go down to the end of the town, well, what can anyone do?’ I used to recite it (in my day children were called on to torture visitors in this way), but while I enjoyed the rhythm and the pace, it ...”

“... young know nothing directly about old age and their inquiries into the topic must be done blind. Helen Small, for instance, pronounces with impressive youthful verve and authority on a condition that must still, in a sense, be a closed book to her. Revealing her own age (42), she laments the dearth of serious philosophical reflection on the subject, and ...”

“... penance and imitation of Christ in his Passion, especially in the very lands where he suffered.Helen Nicholson’s project in Women and the Crusades is to consider all dimensions of women’s participation, both on campaign and on the home front. She casts a very broad net. Like other recent historians, Nicholson redefines crusading to denote ‘any ...”

“... with his poetry, that of Vermeer, and Vermeer’s paintings and interiors! One of the editors, Helen Deese, writes a highly perceptive essay on the relation of Lowell’s poetry to the visual arts, but she seems to take it for granted that the Vermeer analogy invoked, for example, in Lowell’s ‘Epilogue’ is a natural and normal one. It seems to me ...”