“... hard and keen like a hunting animal.’ Here Leo’s daimon is adapting and echoing the words of John Pory, who in 1600 published an English translation of the historical Leo’s La Descrittione dell’ Africa: ‘How many desolate cold mountains and huge drie, and barren deserts passed he? How often was he in hazard to have been captived, or to have had his ...”

“... it officially was) practised religious toleration. When Henri duc d’Anjou was elected king in January 1573, only months after tens of thousands of Protestants had been massacred in his native France, he was forced to submit to a resolution which ran: Since there is in our Commonwealth no little disagreement on the subject of religion, in order to ...”

“... chronicle play, Edward II, with its explicit presentation of a sexual relationship between the king and his favourite, Piers Gaveston, and the rumours about Marlowe’s own sexuality put about by a renegade Catholic priest in the weeks leading up to Marlowe’s death in 1593. According to BL Harley MS.6848 ff.185-6 (known as the ‘Baines note’ and ...”

“... they have encountered over the centuries in combining the roles of temporal and spiritual leader, king and priest – ‘two powers in one body’, as an anonymous 17th-century writer once put it. As a temporal ruler Alexander VII controlled only a mini-state with about a million inhabitants, about a twentieth of the size of the France of Louis XIV. There was ...”

“... troops which an adaptive academic might best give, the sort of thing which in our own time Sir John Hackett would fully understand. It has not been unknown in great soldiers; neither was Lawrence’s other quality, a dishevelled contempt for punctilio and natty dress; Oliver Cromwell, no less, was referred to in awe as ‘that sloven’. Lawrence, for all ...”

“... by a statement of intent. The essays concentrate on Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, King Lear and The Tempest. Greenblatt’s method is to juxtapose famous ‘literary’ texts with lesser-known, ‘non-literary’ texts, such as Jacques Duval’s Des Hermaphrodits (1603), Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (also ...”

“... trope.Then several things happened. The owner of Books and Bookmen, an operator by the name of John Dosse, took the opportunity of emulating the Masada faction and the Goebbelses, and committed suicide himself. I received a moist letter from the editor of the magazine, written in the tone of ‘I hope you’re satisfied now.’ I was accused in print, by ...”

“... the Queen of Romania, Queen Victoria’s third son, the Duke of Connaught, and less frequently King Edward VII. Rose quotes one of Nancy’s ‘most celebrated bons mots’: when invited by the King to play bridge, she is said to have refrained with the claim: ‘Why I don’t even know the difference between a ...”

“... of the Royal College of Surgeons. It is sometimes used for teaching, and is open to the public. John Hunter (1728-93), the first person to articulate an elephant’s skeleton, was the younger brother of William Hunter. Both men were pioneering teachers of anatomy. John set up the museum to house his anatomical ...”

“... draws     down her funds in Girls Gone Wild. Santino’s now   a vampire (Suck and swoon!). John Hurrell receives some surprising new information. Marius makes Armand a virgin   when Armand is seventeen, and Akasha’s like, that’s so     random! Who’s your secret server? After ingesting   derivatives Magnus too becomes a vampire. Anthony ...”

“... a clean air act, or want to commiserate about the bad weather, as George VI did when he looked at John Piper’s drawings of Windsor Castle. You are struck by the observation of things that had not been seen before, or seen rarely, in pictures: things like the backs of the South London houses where Carel Weight set odd encounters that could have come from ...”

“... In the same way, Brown assures us how much he reveres Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King and Aung San Suu Kyi; it might have been more interesting to denounce any or all of these. The title echoes John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, but that book did include some men by no means universally ...”

“... painted The Priest perhaps fifteen years later. Jack B. Yeats was born on 29 August 1871, son of John Butler Yeats and Susan Yeats, at 23 Fitzroy Road, London. His brother, William Butler Yeats, was then six years old. John Butler Yeats was a portrait painter in search of commissions. Finding few, he thought it better to ...”

“... raised to dignity and wealth by Mazel’s gift of good luck, manages to milk a lioness to cure the King; when bad luck has his turn, he spoils his good fortune by saying it is dog’s milk. His fortunes are ruined, for a while, anyway. Again the drawings – in this case brush-drawings by Margot Zemach, rather in the manner of Ben Shahn – are not strictly ...”

“... champion of boxing in a place where people do nothing but wrestle. Or it’s like trying to get John Wayne or Clint Eastwood to look persuasive in Gone with the Wind. I’m not suggesting that Tarantino doesn’t know what he is doing, and he can certainly get jokes of this clashing kind to work for him. One of the film’s finest moments concerns the Texas ...”