“... swimming, and eating in wooded groves; a latterday Elagabalus, perhaps, or an early version of King Charles VI of France, employer of the famous 14th-century chef Taillevent and another monarch in whose life the themes of women and groves recur.)The dominion of ideas is also characteristically French. Nineteenth-century Paris was the core of the ...”

“... pager, in reference to the Israeli operation against Hizbullah; Starmer arrived with a letter from King Charles. On Friday, 26 February Zelensky got out of his car wearing a black tactical sweater. ‘Oh, you’re all dressed up,’ Trump said. They went to the Oval Office to begin their meeting. The usual pool of White House journalists had been expanded ...”

“... not want to take military action against the Scots; he had also been opposed to the execution of Charles. Though Fairfax’s outlook and his Horatian retirement from public life are reflected subtly in the poems, Marvell came to admire Cromwell in the years from 1653 to Cromwell’s death in 1658 – he was the de facto laureate to the new state. He also ...”

“... Cavell’s widely influential study of screwball, Pursuits of Happiness (1981). Multimillionaire Charles ‘Hopsy’ Pike (Henry Fonda) is beguiled twice over by a temptress (Barbara Stanwyck) whom he encounters for the first time as Jean, a con artist working a cruise ship, and then as Lady Eve Sidwich, guest of honour at a party thrown in the Pike family ...”

“... and spit on the other children. 12 February. A shoddy programme about the conviction of Jonathan King for offences against young men dating back twenty-five years and more. While it features some of the police involved, it manages not to ask the pertinent question: if these 15-year-old boys had been 15-year-old girls and romping round in Rolls-Royces even ...”

“... a habit of playing politics when he shouldn’t was the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King. Throughout the financial crisis, Brown believed that King went beyond his remit in permitting his political views – particularly what Brown calls ‘his personal attitude to debt’ – to interfere with his policy ...”

“... Velázquez’s surviving work. They are tall – as tall as many a full-dress portrait of the king – and narrow: an inch short of six feet high, and just a little over three feet across. This suggests that they were conceived together; some historians have thought they may have hung in the same room; the inventory almost says so, but not quite. It is ...”

“... the wish to possess the parent of the opposite sex and eliminate that of the same sex’, as Charles Rycroft put it in his Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis.Freud was talking about what he called, with no apparent irony, the ‘positive’ Oedipus complex. But this implies that there is also a ‘negative’ Oedipus complex, in which, Freud ...”

“... when he took possession of a series of Caribbean islands in the name of the Spanish king. How could he have been contradicted, if no one understood what he was saying? Yet the claim is not void, it is an intricate legalism – as if we were to declare that silence is consent when we have gagged everyone who could speak. Again, the curious ...”

“... In all the stultifying discussion of Prince Charles’s fitness to grasp the orb and sceptre of kingship, there is one qualification that is almost never canvassed. I refer to his ability to give the annual Christmas broadcast to the Commonwealth. No light matter this – it was a dreaded annual penance for his grandfather – and made no lighter by his presumptive inability to end the chat by saying: ‘My wife and I ...”

“... was charged with corporate manslaughter over the ferry disaster at Zeebrugge), and like Lord King, whose advice Thatcher sought constantly without realising that British Airways was engaged in an entrepreneurial dirty tricks campaign against its main competitor, Lord Hanson became one of the Inner Circle which helped the Government to achieve what seemed ...”

“... dust-jacket to Forty Stories mentions Pynchon and Beckett, but this is the world of Thurber and Charles Addams. Barthelme’s more serious intentions were made clear from the start. In ‘Marie, Marie, hold on tight’ (a story not to be found here but in his first book Come back, Dr Caligari) three protestors picket a New York church, in order to ...”

“... is at least not obvious that the proposition ‘If Queen Victoria thought Prince Albert handsome, King George V collected postage stamps’ expresses a causal truth entirely on its own. I have to say that I disagree with Honderich not only on this point but over almost every opinion that I have so far attributed to him. To begin with, I see no need for the ...”

“... of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, again, lies in the contrivances by which the 19th-century hero Charles is furnished with the eye of a 20th-century social historian. As for Thackeray in Esmond, the thread of connection is here not a logical one, as with Waverley, but it is just as unmistakable – a matter of masterly ‘cheating’ and getting of the best ...”

“... at Harrow when he wrote Eric, having previously taught at Marlborough. As a boy he had attended King William’s College on the Isle of Man, an institution which took offence at close resemblances with scenes and incidents in the book. John Addington Symonds, who was head of a house at Harrow when Eric appeared, has put on record his youthful ‘disgust and ...”