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“... Kerry, who was admirably forthright in calling for Mubarak to stand down, dismissed the idea: ‘King Abdullah of Jordan is extraordinarily intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive, in touch with his people. The monarchy there is very well respected, even revered.’ For years, Arab rulers told their Western patrons not to worry about their subjects, as though ...”

“... he was satisfied’, all the details coalesce into a portrait of Eugenides’s late contemporary David Foster Wallace. I want to call Leonard a ‘tribute’ to Wallace, whose suicide presumably occurred while Eugenides was in the middle of writing the book. But most of the time Leonard is an unpleasant character. Mitchell Grammaticus particularly dislikes ...”

“... as part of that biographical evidence: Constance’s grief over the death of her son Arthur in King John must reflect Shakespeare’s grief at the death of his own son, Hamnet; a reference to cuckoldry in Sonnet 93 indicates that Anne Hathaway was unfaithful; and so on. As Shapiro comments, perhaps Shakespeare was thinking of his own life at those ...”

“... resentment. Greek anti-semitism erupted in pogroms in Smyrna and Salonica. (Ottoman Jews, whom David Ben-Gurion despaired of converting to Zionism, were thus natural allies of the Turks.) In Alexandria under the Ottomans and from 1882 under the British, Europeans considered it acceptable to give Arabs a good hiding from time to time. The blending of ...”

“... and the ordinary concerns of life, where work is work and the word ‘tragedy’ connotes not King Lear but cancer or a child run over or a train crash, are intrusive, unwelcome and strange. Has it always been so? And has this limitation of interest necessarily had a bad effect on the chronicler’s prose? It seems once to have been otherwise. The memoirs ...”

“... another example of ‘to fire out’ meaning what it is here taken to mean, and I notice that David and Ben Crystal, in their new glossary Shakespeare’s Words,* do not admit the venereal sense, giving only ‘to drive away by fire’. The poet is not even sure the parties have slept together, and could only have been certain of the consequence accepted ...”

“... bee in the hive is a queen, but the ancients thought they were kings. If the translator has ‘king’, then it will seem very odd to most modern readers; on the other hand, if the translator has ‘queen’, then it will seem normal but produce peculiar results. Faced with this insoluble conundrum, Fallon opts for ‘queen’; Elaine Fantham, in one of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... its ancestry back to the legendary Lucius Junius Brutus who had supposedly expelled the last king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus, in 510 bc, and served as one of the first consuls (the highest elected official in the new Republic) the following year. Brutus was proud of his heritage: he had his family tree painted in the atrium of his house, plotting his ...”

“... from the Dutch in the Napoleonic wars, found there was only one local lord left to deal with. King Vikrama Rajasinha believed he could hold the city of Kandy, which is situated in the jungle of the central highlands – his kingdom had withstood Europeans before. With Napoleon threatening Europe, Robert Brownrigg, the British governor at Colombo, was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and in 1900 returned to the Congo, part of which was under the direct control of Leopold II, King of the Belgians. He began to investigate allegations of brutality in the region; his work was thorough and conscientious, and he was personally responsible for the decision of the Foreign Office to undertake a serious investigation of what was happening in ...”

“... birth. I can remember almost nothing of the house we’d lived in previously, which was at 39 King Edward’s Road, Hackney. I know from a photograph that it was a large, dark, Victorian house, but when I went to take a look at it around 1950 I discovered that it had been destroyed in the Blitz. The other thing I know about it from photographs is that it ...”

“... the sun overshadowed. Oxford seemed both theologically and politically more attractive to the new king, and to his minister Lord North, who became its Chancellor in 1772. Cambridge meanwhile languished under a Whig, latitudinarian, and consequently out-of-favour aristocrat, Lord Grafton, who inconsiderately refused either to give up his Chancellorship or to ...”

“... is a sympathetic sense of the man, and an analysis of his political style, that of the Biblical ‘king-priest’ of a secular church. It was, however, even more marked by a pragmatism akin to O’Connell’s, and a repudiation on de Valera’s part of his militant Republican past, except (ambiguously and dangerously) as one ingredient in a finely-calculated ...”