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“... be with you, Balliol men!’ Was Aubrey Herbert, this human plum, ever ripe enough to be king of Albania, a country which twice offered him the throne? After finishing Margaret FitzHerbert’s excellent book the reader may be in two minds; at least King Aubrey would have wielded the sceptre with more panache than ...”

“... is evidence. The first big ship named in the sources, the Leontophoros or ‘Lion-bearer’ of King Lysimachus, was deployed in battle only once, so far as we know. It was built in a fit of pique and rivalry, after Lysimachus had been frightened off attacking his enemy Demetrius when Demetrius staged an impromptu naval review off the coast of ...”

“... who had welcomed him would go along with the next step, Henry set about preparing to supplant the king. On 30 September, before the assembled lords and commons in Westminster Hall, he claimed the throne, which Richard had abdicated the day before, as the true heir ‘descended by right line of the blood coming from the good lord ...”

“... Stephen King has occasionally raised a rueful protest against being typed as a horror writer – even with the consolation of being the best-selling horror writer in the history of the world. But, as he disarmingly reminds us, there is worse literary company than Lovecraft, Leiber, Bloch, Matheson and Jackson. ‘I could, for example, be an “important” writer like Joseph Heller and publish a novel every seven years or so, or a “brilliant” writer like John Gardner and write obscure books for bright academics who eat macrobiotic foods and drive old Saabs with faded but still legible GENE McCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT stickers on the rear bumpers ...”

“... In Michael Korda’s Curtain a thinly disguised Laurence Olivier puts at risk his marriage to a thinly disguised Vivien Leigh by having an affair with (stop me if you’ve heard this one) a no less thinly disguised Danny Kaye. Well! Well? As a piece of writing, the novel is aimed with charming accuracy at the station bookstall trade, where it should thrive ...”

“... question is why the admired court jester would want to write a sardonic script about the king.)Mank is supposed to stay off the booze, which isn’t going to happen. He can’t do much gambling in these isolated quarters, but we see plenty of it in flashbacks, and indeed in what is the best of the film’s several set-pieces. The year is 1934 and ...”

“... up whenever the records are sparse. No male narrator comes between Mai Zetterling or Florence King and their readers. Each tells her tale in her own way. Mai’s way is to spill it out higgledy-piggledy as though at a diagnostic session with a psychiatrist. She chooses, somewhat startlingly, to represent her early years in Sweden as an unbroken cavalcade ...”

“... for example, has recently been enjoying An Englishman in Paris: l’éducation continentale by Michael Sadler (Simon and Schuster, £10). On 14 April Charles wrote Sadler a letter, duly circulated a few weeks later by his publishers (I don’t think it’s a hoax). To make sense of it, it’s useful to know that Sadler’s book opens with a description of ...”

“... conciliatory, too ready to put up with, even to proselytise for, the morally mediocre life, as if King Lear were to get used to the hospitality of Goneril and Regan. I think now the pain of the film is too intense for that. No one is just putting up with anything, everyone is putting a brave face on things, quite a different operation. The characters in ...”

“... novel. Still, it’s useful to have two eyes in the realm where a one-eyed person is proverbially king, and it’s especially useful when it comes to killing Gael García Bernal, the charming leader of the bad guys, a master of anti-solidarity who holds the whole facility up to ransom, demanding first everyone’s valuables and then the sexual submission of ...”

“... Shaka King’s​ Judas and the Black Messiah (available on Amazon Prime) leaves us in no doubt as to who is the more interesting character. This preference is obscured (or perhaps highlighted) by the fact that the actors playing the two parts (LaKeith Stanfield and Daniel Kaluuya) have both been nominated as ‘best supporting actor’ at this year’s Oscars, as if there were no main role, or it might be dangerous to say which it is ...”

“... Now that works such as Francis Haskell’s Patrons and Painters (first published in 1963) and Michael Levey’s Painting at Court (1971) have made the social history of art respectable, it is becoming quite difficult to remember the time when it was virtually restricted, or abandoned, to a handful of Central European Marxist émigrés such as Frederick ...”

“... both his friends and his enemies feared, with good reason, that he intended to make himself king, a title hated by republican aristocrats with a nearly superstitious fervour. Augustus, however, disclaimed regal ambitions and presented his new regime as a restoration of the republic, even though all real military power, and pretty much all civil ...”

“... established the orthodoxies of the future, as in 431 or 451; and no one decided to rule Italy as a king for the first time in a millennium, as would happen in 476. On the other hand, we know next to nothing about so many fifth-century years that 428, with its relative bounty of evidence, is actually quite extraordinary. Sources that did not exist even a decade ...”

“... between master and servant provided a template for almost every kind of affiliation: between king and courtier, ruler and subject, patron and client, commander and soldier, employer and apprentice, or even between husband and wife, parent and child, mistress and lover. ‘Trust and service’, a character in Middleton’s The Witch (c.1616) declares, are ...”