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“... dialogue of Plato’s entitled The Symposium, praises his master Socrates, beyond all doubt the prince of philosophers, he compares him, amongst other things, to a Silenus. Now a Silenus, in ancient days, was a little box, of the kind we see today in apothecaries’ shops, painted on the outside with such gay, comical figures as harpies, satyrs, bridled ...”

“... mourning cast over him and the whole of the latter part of the century blotted out the prince consort again. The gilded figure enshrined in the Hyde Park memorial gradually congealed into Lytton Strachey’s ‘impeccable waxwork’ and Albert, as an individual, was for some time lost to history. The younger son of a minor Bavarian duke of ...”

“... For us​ ,’ Steffen Ahrends told his son Peter, who was born in Berlin in 1933, ‘the history of architecture started with the Soviet 1917 revolution.’ It wasn’t entirely a joke. For many designers in the Weimar Republic, and for subsequent generations of modernist hardliners, 1917 had made possible a reconstruction of life on collective, egalitarian and, above all, planned lines ...”

“... Lord Balmerino and Lord Kilmarnock used their last moments together to dismiss the idea that Prince Charles Edward Stuart, their ‘bonnie prince’, could have signed such an order. They both ‘vehemently denied’ it before they walked to the scaffold. Whether Cumberland himself was aware of the forgery, or even ...”

“... Peter Gay’s The Cultivation of Hatred completes his Freudian psychoanalysis of the bourgeois 19th century by bringing aggression to bear alongside the forces of sexuality which form the subject of the preceding volumes, Education of the Senses and The Tender Passion. That aggression and sexuality are intimately associated, at once intermingled and opposed, Gay has no doubt, pointing to the ‘provocative oxymorons like “sweet cruelty”, the “voluptuousness of revenge” and “cruel tenderness” ’, in which Heine and others registered their sense of the ambiguity of the relationship ...”

“... working for Edward III in the 1330s; Giles Avenel of Brussels, who made pieces for the Black Prince; and the Fleming Stephen Vyne, whose recommendation from the duc de Berry secured him work with Richard II. (The remarkable number of known names attests to these craftsmen’s prestige, although it’s rare that individual pieces can be attached to a ...”

“... Cinderella, Bo Peep and Berie sneak off for a smoke in the alley between Hickory Dickory Dock and Peter Pumpkin Eater’s Pumpkin. Neither children nor adults, they are about to learn that story-land is a sad and gory land, and they deride the credulity of children who think otherwise. To the little girl who keeps stroking her glitter and asking for the ...”

“... how rich and powerful Lord Channon has become! There is his house in Belgrave Square next door to Prince George, duke of Kent, and duchess of ditto and little Prince Edward. The house is all Regency upstairs with very carefully draped curtains and Madame Récamier sofas and wall paintings. Then the dining room is entered ...”

“... Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), Greenmantle (1916) and Mr Standfast (1918) – though one chapter of A Prince of the Captivity (1933) is concerned with the hero’s experiences as a spy. Of these Greenmantle is undoubtedly the best: The Thirty-Nine Steps is too short, Mr Standfast too long; and Greenmantle contains, too, the perfectly imagined enemy in Colonel von ...”

“... prominent writers, no less prominent scholars and statesmen and even the occasional Prussian prince. Her later salon, which she ran in association with her husband, became a focus for liberal writers, with Heinrich Heine her most distinguished catch. All this made her a household word. She became still more familiar to the general public after her death ...”

“... In Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, the Prince found by the River Thames ‘a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber’. Of course, the truth of the ancient state, like the truth of the British state at the turn of the 19th century, was not necessarily a wholly savoury one ...”

“... of what was surveyed on black and white television with an Olympian commentary by Clive Graham and Peter O’Sullevan. ‘Under starter’s orders,’ the public address system boomed. A hush fell over the distant stands. ‘They’re off.’ As the thunder of the hoofs receded, the roar of the punters rose. The Red Cross van lumbered slowly in pursuit. I ...”

“... only naming Epstein as her abuser but claiming she’d also been told to have sex with his friends Prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz. Who were the ‘potential co-conspirators’ granted immunity under the Florida plea bargain? All the named parties have denied the allegations, but the question of ‘Jeffrey’s friends’ is now at the heart of the case. The ...”

“... and a vicarious stay at one of his most cherished hotels – the Grand Hotel Oloffson in Port au Prince, Haiti. Since he has been so generous and direct with us, he might at least have let us in on a further secret – one of the tricks of the trade, so to speak. He might have explained to us, confidentially, that fiction is a machine for taking away ...”

“... I was a friend and devoted admirer of Peter Cook for thirty years but I never realised until I read this book how much our early lives had overlapped. We were born in the same week into the same sort of family. His father, like mine, was a colonial servant rushing round the world hauling down the Imperial flag. At one stage both fathers were ensnared in the argument about the most appropriate capital for the West Indies Federation: an argument as vexed as it was futile since the Federation lasted only a few months ...”