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“... 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 ...”

“... a long sequence of racially aggravated land grabs ending in the 1670s with the decisive trauma of King Philip’s War. Prisoners were enslaved, though Africans were thought to be better workers and were available in bulk. New Englanders were not avid slaveowners, but they supplied the horses, timber and food that allowed Caribbean plantations to specialise in ...”

“... of copies were printed and distributed to teenagers across the country (at almost the same time, Michael Gove was sending copies of the King James Bible, with a foreword by himself, to every school in England). The government also passed a law allowing it to appoint judges even if the opposition disagreed, and seven judges ...”

“... which needless to say never got written. Firbank rather than Wilde. Geoffrey played Warren, the king’s doctor, in the film The Madness of King George, with Cyril Shaps as Pepys, who set great store by the king’s motions. ‘Oh the stool, the stool,’ said Warren. ‘My dear ...”

“... to understand the person’s features in motion over time. That hadn’t always been the case. Michael Wishart, the son of Freud’s lover Lorna Wishart, said that when Freud was young, you couldn’t blink while he was painting your thumb or he became ‘distressed’. The majority of Freud’s prints, made three and a half decades later, were part of a ...”

“... Middle East was awash in ‘cheap credit for leveraged buyouts’. Naqvi, the ‘Gulf’s Buyout King’, hobnobbed with presidents, prime ministers and business celebrities, and spoke at investment conferences held by the UN, the World Bank and the World Economic Forum. His firm raised billions from investors, including development finance agencies like the ...”

“... Jamahiriyya, has ended badly. In contrast to the bloodless coup of 1 September 1969 that overthrew King Idris and brought Gaddafi and his colleagues to power, the combined rebellion/civil war/ Nato bombing campaign to protect civilians has occasioned several thousand (5000? 10,000? 25,000?) deaths, many thousands of injured and hundreds of thousands of ...”