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“... end of the town without consulting him. She never comes back. It is shrugged off very casually: King John (somebody told me) Said to a man he knew: ‘If people go down to the end of the town, well, what can anyone do?’ I used to recite it (in my day children were called on to torture visitors in this way), but while I enjoyed the rhythm and the pace, it ...”

“... the Catholic faith. All seats were sold countrywide. The Cautionary Tales – which tell of Henry King, ‘Who chewed bits of String and was early cut off in Dreadful Agonies’, and Rebecca, ‘Who slammed Doors for Fun and Perished Miserably’ – are in iambic octosyllabic couplets and can run to fifty lines or so. How did Clara Butt contrive to sing ...”

“... generally. Cabantous touches on the excesses of English Restoration libertines like Sir Charles Sedley and on the slightly earlier and more philosophical French examples, notably Théophile de Viau. Atheists were of course blasphemers by definition, and we know from the charges against Christopher Marlowe that, like Théophile, they sometimes larded ...”

“... know-all. August Vanags was unworthy of being the author of his own book. Put him on Larry King, and he’d unsell Boy 381 at the rate of thousands a minute. So instead they packed him off to Whidbey Island with an ex-directory phone number and refused all interviews on his behalf. And with good reason, since even Lucy – though perhaps there’s no ...”

“... some prayers of unsettled authorship, a dramatisation of part of Samuel Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison, admittedly of little interest in itself, and some poems of which the same might be said. The 100-page introduction is lovingly minute in its coverage of early commentary, and the annotations are careful and useful. The performances of the other ...”

“... gift. He was given a minor position in the elaborate hierarchy of servants who supplied the king with his every need. Later on he married a woman who was reputed to be a soft-skinned beauty, and the couple had a number of children, most of them hairy like their father. Among the hirsute offspring were three girls: Maddalena, Francesca and Antonietta. As ...”

“... of its sort in English – means we know the 15th-century Pastons better than we know any medieval king or queen. The letters, first published in 1787, revealed a family on the make. Clement Paston, a yeoman farmer born at the end of the 14th century, set his son up as a lawyer. The lawyer bought land, and his son John inherited more, including Caister ...”

“... English satire; on Swift, Pope and Prior, as well as a host of lesser-known figures, including Charles Cotton, Tom Brown and William King. Among the most conspicuous features of early 18th-century Menippean satire was the cod scholarly apparatus. Mandeville’s generically unstable Fable, with its core tale written in ...”

“... The Song of Songs at Paris’s Théâtre des Arts: The opening scene, presenting the meeting of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, was decorated in purple, the score was of C-major chords and the perfume was incense. Later scenes matched yellow with the scent of hyacinths, green with lily, and so on. The poet Paul Fort remembered that ‘the projections ...”

“... This makes it a maddening book to read, and only someone who knows the biographies of Welles by Charles Higham, Simon Callow and others is likely to guess what Conrad is up to and why. Yet he is also writing criticism. Here the difference should matter between a line written as a writer writes and a line spoken as an actor reads. Even in a study like this ...”

“... wife and four older children in Warrington, where he had served six terms as mayor. So Ken went to King Edward’s School, got a better education than he would have found at most boarding-schools, grew up heterosexual and entered Magdalen, Oxford in 1945 on a demyship of £50 a year. His spending allowance, ten pounds a week, was larger than that of most ...”

“... We, too, can invoke history to explain our hesitation. Seven hundred years ago, Dante wrote King Milutin of Rascia into the book that lies open on the Day of Judgment. Milutin’s sin, the imperial eagle explains to the poet in the Paradiso, was to forge Venetian ducats (‘il conio di Vinegia’). Today his remote descendant Milan ...”

“... a draft deferment every bit as opportunist as Clinton’s. He also supported the Martin Luther King movement, and paid generous tribute to it (criticising his own party for its abstention and opposition) in his inaugural address as Speaker. Furthermore, he has admitted to smoking dope, to divorcing his first wife while she was in the recovery room after a ...”

“... passionate but unconsummated love affair with Richard Doughty-Wylie (nephew of the great explorer Charles Doughty), whom she had met when he was British Consul in Konya. Doughty-Wylie was married, and was not prepared to risk his career by leaving his wife. A man with physical courage to match Gertrude’s, he was killed a year later at Gallipoli, in an ...”