“... living novelist versus Britain’s greatest ever novelist as if it were a literary Godzilla meets King Kong. Ackroyd understands Dickens better than pettifogging academics because Ackroyd, like his subject, is a creative genius, and such minds are privileged to think alike. Ackroyd himself makes this claim, if rather more tactfully than his ...”

“... now remembered, between approximately 1848 and 1912 Rossetti was, in Whistler’s phrase, ‘a king’. And his imperium was very broad. It encompassed the leading intellectuals of the period as well as a popular audience created and nourished by many cultural entrepreneurs. As with Walter Scott and so many others, that success and influence would ...”

“... more scarce. The 1880s also saw Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, not to mention the remarkable growth of the Boys’ Own Paper. And not only was literature being specially produced for children: children were at last being seen as possessing an imaginative life of their own. Ariès points out how ...”

“... wandering among Continental spas and the Riviera resorts. Victoria’s compassion for a fallen king arid personal protégé rose superior to racial or political differences. On a private visit to Grasse in 1891 she invited Duleep to meet her. When the now obese invalid, half-paralysed from a stroke, broke violently into sobbing, Victoria ‘stroked and ...”

“... survive it. People won’t stop having children after Dunblane any more than they do after seeing King Lear. Both these scholarly and moving books – an increasingly rare combination – are about what we’ve got to set against what Kerrigan calls the ‘arbitrariness of destruction’. Tragedy questions our capacity – our wish – to make ...”

“... to free the hull.    Later, the mines exploded, destroying the Japanese warship.    The King decorated Magennis at Buckingham Palace in December 1945.    But though he returned to a hero’s welcome from the people of Belfast, he was never officially honoured in the city of his birth.    After a string of menial jobs, he was forced to sell ...”

“... do-nothings; also like Hunt (whose earliest recollection was of his father’s room in the King’s Bench prison in 1784), he seems to have spent his entire life in debt. A century and a half after the publication of Bleak House, the shadow of Skimpole is lifting. Whatever Hunt’s faults, he was manifestly neither an idler nor a scoundrel, and there ...”

“... Queen Lab, who turns her lovers into birds; a terrifying encounter with the mummified effigy of King Solomon and his magic ring, guarded by giant serpents; a descent into the underworld; a young lover who sits disconsolate after the death of his beloved from a snake bite. Kilito has often returned to The Arabian Nights in fine-grained studies with a ...”

“... audio recordings of Huey Long exciting crowds as big as these with his pitch of ‘Every Man a King,’ also to Father Coughlin, the anti-semitic ‘radio priest’ from Michigan, just to remind myself of the authentic sound of American demagoguery. But to see a true analogy for an Obama rally, one need only attend almost any large black church on a Sunday ...”

“... Israeli rule. Surely it would have been better, as the intelligence men had concluded, to allow King Hussein to continue integrating Palestinians in Jordan, thus eroding Palestinian identity? There was not a single area, during the 1967 war, in which the military behaved in a way that was consistent with its earlier analysis. Some might call this evidence ...”

“... to Jupiter on one side and on the other, rather more riskily, to Pasiphae, the legendary wife of King Minos and mother of the Minotaur. This must have been seen as a fair match for the Julio-Claudians’ claim to be the descendants of Venus through her son Aeneas. Yet, if his ancestral past was glorious enough, the future of Galba’s line was more ...”

“... His narrative is entirely about being taken seriously by Elton John, Princess Diana, George Michael, Anthea Turner, Richard Branson, Paul McCartney, Patsy Kensit, Ian Botham, Jordan, Mohammed al Fayed, Cherie Blair, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair. (If there are names in that list you haven’t heard of, don’t worry, none of them ...”

“... is all. (Kitcher and Schacht repeatedly stress what they see as analogies between the Ring and King Lear. They say, for example, that ‘Lear and the Ring are both studies in the power and expression of love.’ I wouldn’t have thought so in either case.) Now I suppose what matters in Shakespeare’s kind of tragedy is the characters’ psychology: the ...”

“... jazz club stands). Within a few days Wolfgang and Nannerl had been granted an audience with King George III and Queen Charlotte, but their trip was very nearly derailed when Leopold contracted a throat infection that left him bedbound for weeks. With all concerts cancelled for the duration, Wolfgang was able to concentrate on composition for the first ...”