“... how Jonathan Power tells it. Amnesty began in 1961, with the simple and apparently absurd idea of Peter Benenson, a British lawyer, that governments could be persuaded to release political prisoners simply by ordinary people writing letters to them. This remains the core of Amnesty’s work. Power’s is not an uncritical history. He refers both to the ...”

“... series presenting adaptations of Sade’s works by Buñuel, von Stroheim, Pasolini, Guy Debord, Peter Brook and Nagisa Oshima. Meanwhile, the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade has published its fourth volume of Sade, a lavish 1150-page edition of the great erotic writings: 120 Days of Sodom, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Justine. The works span the decade ...”

“... thought he looked like ‘an insane stork’, and to the people of Samoa in the 1890s he was a king or a sort of god, Tusi Tala, ‘teller of tales’. He is variously described by witnesses as ...”

“... at having connived at his father’s arrest for treason in Nahum Tate’s 1681 acting version of King Lear, Regan whispers to him: ‘The Grotto, Sir, within the lower Grove,/Has Privacy to suit a Mourner’s Thought.’ The next scene duly opens on ‘A Grotto’, where we find ‘Edmund and Regan amorously Seated, Listning to Musick’. But ...”

“... and be satisfied with a smaller quantity of meat. She prospered. Fending off the advances of the king of Norway, who offered her a cosy little flat for their encounters (‘But I need a large one!’ she replied), she made a name for herself as a fashion journalist, founding French Vogue and helping to establish Schiaparelli.Her son became a highbrow playboy ...”

“... unofficial and convenient way even if at first it is a little forced’. But the role of the Good King soon began to pall. At Oxford, he wrote to a friend: ‘I wish to God I’d been brought up in an intelligent, sane (but not too stiff and British) middle-class family with a close connection with some kind of work ...”

“... of the condition of being screwed up.She married her second husband, the composer and musician Peter Gordon, ‘in the throes’ of this first scare, in an attempt to get coverage from his medical insurance, but the lump turned out to be benign. It would be the first of several until the discovery, in 1996, of a lump that wasn’t.‘At that time,’ Acker ...”

“... stalemate filled with rumours, conspiracy theories: drugs, communists, the IRA, the Angry Brigade, Peter Hain. ‘The demons proliferate … The enemy is lurking everywhere. He – or increasingly she – is behind everything … Nevertheless, in its varying and protean forms, official society – the state, the political leadership, the opinion leaders, the ...”

“... get hysterical about Wagner, but the old tropes still surface. Published less than 18 months ago, Peter Conrad’s big book Verdi and/or Wagner happily revisits Nietzsche’s dichotomy between the fog-bound, mephitic, enervating music of the North (Wagner) and the life-giving vitality and pagan health of the music of the Mediterranean – with the difference ...”

“... an enduring (quasi-)Marxist current in British gay activism, represented by both Jeffrey Weeks and Peter Tatchell, has viewed ‘homosexuals’ as an oppressed class, like the proletariat, produced, along with housewives, by a historically contingent bourgeois sexual system which emerged alongside modern capitalism/consumerism in the 19th century. Its focus is ...”

“... TV, and was re-released in the cinema to coincide with Welles’s return to the Broadway stage as King Lear. In America especially, the era of the art-house, the film-society circuit, film magazines and film schools began. Andrew Sarris launched the cult of the auteur. His key thesis was Citizen Kane: The American Baroque, in which he described Kane as ‘the ...”

“... which is not the scene of de la Mare’s engrossing stanza: Who said, ‘Peacock Pie’? The old king to the sparrow. Who said, ‘Crops are ripe’? Rust to the harrow. It is solid stuff: the more we repeat it the more true facts emerge. The old king’s words are at once a threat, a gibe and an ironical comment ...”

“... preparations been more painstaking than in the run-up to the great demonstration at St Peter’s Fields on 16 August 1819. The crowds assembled to hear Orator Hunt speak about reform have been variously estimated at between 35,000 and 150,000. Manchester magistrates had plenty of experience in dealing roughly with large protests by desperate ...”

“... of trust’. They drew up a ‘black list’ of MPs who had accepted offices and rewards from the king, claiming that this was a conflict of interest. In 1700 and 1701, after the constitutional revolution of 1688, excise and then customs collectors were disqualified from sitting in Parliament for this reason. Earlier, in 1644, Parliament had established an ...”

“... that ‘he’s never been ashamed of me’ has to be the greatest parental misjudgment since King Lear banished Cordelia). After a short career in provincial rep (in an era when rep ads stipulated ‘no fancy salaries and no queer folk’), Osborne drew on his equally short first marriage in writing Look Back in Anger; when she saw the set, Pamela ...”