“... Giles Foden and Ann Harries have produced new examples of the genre. In his first novel, The Last King of Scotland, Foden brilliantly re-created the Uganda of General Amin, portrayed with increasing horror through the eyes of a naive young Scottish doctor. He evidently remembers Uganda very well (as I can vouch, having lived there a little earlier) and, in ...”

“... turns. At first it seems as if it is going to be a biographical account of the trickster figure of John Laroche, one of the thieves in question. Laroche is an obsessive collector, having been through passionate affairs with turtles, fossils and tropical fish before committing himself to orchids – at least for some of the time Orlean knew him. It is at a ...”

“... war broke out, Cantos 52 to 71, known to initiates as the Chinese History Cantos followed by the John Adams Cantos, seem to him as to many of us wrongly conceived as well as sloppily executed. His dislike of them takes a special turn, however, when for the failure of the Adams sequence he blames John Adams, not ...”

“... had to back-translate FitzGerald’s quatrains into Persian. Baron Corvo did a version; Augustus John supplied the images for a translation into Romany Welsh. More recently, W.G. Sebald searched out FitzGerald’s grave in the churchyard in the village of Boulge in Suffolk, and, in the same way that FitzGerald chose to speak through Omar Khayyám, Sebald ...”

“... The Nazis took movies very seriously. Urwand opens his book by recounting a discussion of King Kong in 1933 by members of a committee convened to decide whether the film could be ‘expected to damage the health of normal spectators’. The expert witness from the German Health Office thundered that it was ‘nothing less than an attack on the nerves ...”

“... disguising the occasional approach of ‘the ogres that were then still native to this land’. King Arthur is remembered not just as a legend but as someone it was possible to serve. Britons and Saxons live in separate communities but with a certain amount of overlap, any tensions kept below a simmer. You could describe events in the book as ...”

“... internalised version of the mother. We can’t be sure of the effect of the lost mother on the king penguin, but we can be in no doubt that it matters greatly to England’s royal family. In his essay ‘The Place of the Monarchy’, Winnicott helps us gain traction on the problem: ‘It is in the personal inner psychic reality that the thing is ...”

“... of ‘aliens’ in various guises, including those appearing in monster-breeding films such as King Kong. As Warner makes clear in her opening lecture, myths are very versatile, though it is a piece of social engineering to pretend that a myth-story is always the same, and the same from time immemorial, because it is true. Actually, myths renew and ...”

“... for state authority thus to associate peace with terror. In Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, the King’s infant daughter is praised in a powerful prophecy: ‘She shall be loved and feared,’ and her royal attributes shall be ‘peace, plenty, love, truth, terror’. Our disputations about the nuclear deterrent are connected with the suspicion that it ...”

“... means not only that Latin acronym tattooed on British soldiers’ arms – Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews – but something lower-grade: Imperatorem Napoleonem Regem Interficiamus – ‘Kill Napoleon, the King Emperor.’ In This Man and Music, Burgess prints a passage from Beethoven’s Eroica above his bit of ...”

“... the practical purpose of the extensive enterprise of its compilation was to make sure that the King would extract all that he could of geld, they show that there was a close relationship in 1086 between the resources of a manor and the values recorded in Domesday, and a similar systematic relationship between the values and the tax assessment. The ...”

“... power relations. Hobbes’s ulterior aim was, of course, to defend a form of absolutism, extending John Selden’s thought that, in a household, only one man’s there to buy the meat. But Hobbes’s views about meaning threaten to prove subversive. Counterfactuals – imagined possibilities – can be used to challenge the status quo. Invert hegemony ...”

“... good novel of the great age of American paranoia, the age that began just before the Kennedy/King assassinations, and faded away somewhere in the early Nineties. It’s not that the Forties and Fifties didn’t have their paranoias, or that we are short of paranoids now. It’s that people didn’t always believe, and don’t have to believe, that what ...”

“... or might not be wearing. The new regime would be pursuing a tough Marxist agenda in which the King of Kings had no place beside the agricultural collective, the village assembly and the literacy campaign. There was much, if not everything, to hope for from the overthrow of Haile Selassie. ‘It would, of course, be unrealistic to expect that the poverty ...”

“... it. Even the man who was to become the most famous of the early English captives in America, John Smith, who had been ‘rescued’ from the Algonquin chief, Powhatan, by his daughter Pocahontas (playing Medea to Smith’s Jason), had first been captured by the Turks and sold as a slave in Istanbul. The continuity of the stories of the Empire from the ...”