“... when it reached London: ‘Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801’ and ‘Presented by King George III’.On 27 September 1822, Jean-François Champollion wrote his Lettre à M. Dacier, presenting to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres his system for reading Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, derived from the Rosetta Stone. He finally set ...”

“... offer of a column on the Telegraph when he was proprietor. This was naturally embarrassing for Charles Moore, the editor, and annoying for the rest of the staff or, as Amiel puts it, a ‘small but vocal-in-corners group’ of them. Amiel sought the advice of William (Bill) Deedes, a former editor, a ‘seminal figure at the paper’ and all-round ...”

“... ill, he was carried on a litter to the Hotel de Ville to acclaim the advent of the Citizen King, Louis-Philippe – who appointed him to the Conseil d’Etat, and gave him 200,000 francs to pay off his gambling debts. He died in December 1830, aged 63, too soon to witness the disappointments of the new regime. His funeral cortège, led by the ageing ...”

“... of that great American aesthetic invention: the long, open-ended poem of Whitman, Pound and Charles Olson. Jefferson’s insistence on the provisional nature of Notes is, like the title of Wallace Stevens’s monumental ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’, a sly boast about the inability of formal systems to keep up with the fecundity and fluidity of ...”

“... become editor of the union newspaper, the Miner, a post which entailed membership of the court of King Arthur at his Sheffield Camelot. Routledge was spurned in 1983; it was a painful experience, which may have something to do with his feelings about Scargill. To read that his association with the miners’ leader was a ‘voyage of disillusionment’, that ...”

“... But the notion that a friendly press can deliver votes has never been very convincing. Cecil King wasn’t the first person to see that newspapers could accelerate or slow up a trend, but never reverse or create one. The popular press, as Koss notes, encouraged a volatile public opinion which it could provoke and stimulate but seldom guide once the ...”

“... fantasies, and the law became a pillow to his unhindered, unrestrained desire.’ Scorsese’s The King of Comedy is a brilliant exposition of the same argument, one whose truth we can sense from seeing less obviously insane Americans on game shows – or hearing them interviewed about their view of world events. At the book’s best moments this process of ...”

“... men in the wars. In this period, also, the Princeton Model Life Tables, a volume which would earn Charles Lamb’s description of a ‘thing’ in book’s clothing, are used to estimate vital events. The rapidly changing mortality pattern of the period appears to lie within the systems covered by the Princeton North tables. Another problem patch is the ...”

“... not conscious of the ownership of that diabolical arrangement called a stomach’ – and Charles Darwin’s friends understood that his uncontrollable retching and farting seriously limited his public life. Historical tradition had tended to associate indigestion and related ailments with certain sorts of people, but new democratic elements were ...”

“... obscene and enabled the rise of the bodily profane. Enter the Earl of Rochester, his remarks about Charles II’s sceptre and his prick being of a length, and his description of how in St James’s Park the ‘Poor pensive Lover in this place/Wou’d frigg upon his Mothers face/Whence Rowes of Mandrakes tall did rise/Whose lewd Topps Fuckt the very ...”

“... the burning heat of a bridal suite in use,You’re the breasts of VenusYou’re King Kong’s penis,You’re self-abuse.As he moved through his days, Porter insisted he was more or less always at work writing songs, just not necessarily at the piano. ‘I’ve done lots of work at dinner, sitting between two bores. I can feign listening ...”

“... The horror!’ as his epigraph for that work. The implication is that Kurtz sees himself as the king who must die so that kingship may live and the land be saved from its sickness. Willard has stumbled out of the 20th century and into a timeless zone of magic and sacrifice, and the viewer of the film is looking at a kind of scrapbook of Modernist ...”

“... high or middle-grade erotic printmakers, builders of grottos, providers of poesie to the king of Spain. These various sites and types of image-making amount to a circuitry, in Bull’s opinion, not a set of high-and-low sealed chambers. ‘Somewhere along the route from porn to poesie,’ he says in a not uncharacteristic sentence, ‘the loves of ...”

“... luminous look’. Risen from the pages of Enid Starkie’s Life, here was her hero of heroes, Charles Baudelaire, and he was staring right at her: ‘He wanted to impress himself on me – young clay takes the print better. And the message was totally cynical. It wasn’t a “follow me” message. It was a quizzical, satirical: “You too?”’This is ...”

“... 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 ...”