“... was even dressed up in drag by the princess and her girls for fun’. In Portrait of a Castrato, Roger Freitas writes that ‘contemporaries frequently regarded castrati as analogues to boys … The castrato does seem frequently to have taken the boy’s role in sodomitical sex.’ Thus castrati could shift and transform themselves. Everybody, it ...”

“... bias. Johnson acknowledges this: ‘I got my lives put neatly together, and sent them to the King ... If the King is a Whig, he will not like them; but is any King a Whig?’ The Lives are indeed a Tory work, and there was soon an anonymous ‘furious fellow’ protesting in print ...”

“... her throne. She and her gloomy husband seek shelter at the court of Le Roi des Bons Enfants, ‘King Goodchild’ (Grundy) or the King of Goodfellows, who rules over a carelessly happy court, where no one is allowed to preach or to gossip, where everyone has affairs but no one indulges sentiment: ‘ce n’estoit pas 1e ...”

“... for reverie and conjecture, becoming the ‘shore of dreaming’ (‘l’orée du songe’), as Roger Caillois called his own collection of stones. Like dream stones, the myths are puzzles, and they keep inviting new thoughts. The story of Medea intersects with the myth of the voyage of the Argo; but it is the continuing electric power of her myth to ...”

“... by the Scots and had been finally resolved, years later, in Ireland when James II, the last Stuart king, was defeated at the Battle of the Boyne in 1689, it was downright alarming to go home and see TV footage of riots at Orange parades that showed this supposedly definitive and long-past battle was actually still in progress, and that nowadays the people on ...”

“... He entertained expectations of a reformation of Christendom from the coming conjunction of 1325. Roger Bacon was similarly smitten with this doctrine of planetary conjunctions. He used them to predict that the Islamic religion would last 693 years, and looked forward to the coming world dominance of Christianity. America comes into the act with recent ...”

“... men, or some of them (and these would include Prynne), would be fighting for Parliament against King in 1642 and championing a ‘root and branch’ destruction of bishops. A criticism of my study, and of other revisionist works, is that we are better-informed, as a result, about why the Civil War did not happen at any period before 1642, than about why it ...”

“... system. And when he has surrounded himself with that quality, bought with his blood, he is a king.’ This self-appointed monarch would stand for long hours contemplating his own collection, lecturing on it and writing long, prolix books about it. Vollard (the only dealer he couldn’t bully, and who insisted on getting Barnes’s money upfront before ...”

“... to Mike Molloy, a Mirror reporter. Molloy confronts Gould, who refers him to his solicitor, Sir Roger Pelham. A few minutes later when the phone rang again Raymond still hadn’t moved. He picked up the receiver, his hand still shaking. Pelham confirmed that Molloy had been in touch with him.      ‘I presume you made no comment,’ said ...”

“... back to the religion of their youth. Kselman describes, for example, the climactic moment in Roger Martin du Gard’s 1913 novel Jean Barois. Freethinking apostle of science and reason, Barois finds himself reciting a desperate Hail Mary when his horse-drawn carriage collides with two Parisian street-cars. Uninjured but morally shaken by his retreat into ...”

“... This, as he recognises, is a form of self-praise. Throughout, Patrick is both the ‘King of the World’ that he wants to be – Glasgow belongs to him – and an abject sinner. The rage of the novel’s males would be enough to put the wind up Margaret Thatcher if it weren’t so often the rage of those who believe themselves permanently beaten ...”

“... pays off well: it makes a first-rate anthology. There are a number of poems, by Suckling, Henry King, George Farewell, Andrew Young, which will probably be new to the reader, and which will certainly produce ‘the illusion that it was written specially for me’. There are well-known favourites too, like Housman’s ‘Bredon Hill’ and Flecker’s ...”

“... finale without comprehending it’, but the only Anglophone novelist his uncle reads is Stephen King, and even that is a recently acquired taste. For Radhesh, ‘dismissive as he was of modernism’, there is only one real writer: ‘English poets couldn’t match Tagore for his finesse. European poets largely didn’t exist. And no Bengali poet … could ...”

“... often included figurative and allegorical representations: ‘The “chemical wedding” of solar king and lunar queen might represent the alchemical process of conjunction – the physical joining of gold and silver – or suggest an analogy for the mysterious and unseen bonds between substances, now envisioned in terms of human desire.’ Naked men and ...”

“... of letters, present them with nothing but horror and crueltie’. In The Scholemaster (1570), Roger Ascham argued that ‘yong children [are] soner allured by loue, then driuen by beating, to attayne good learning.’ But he could do little to shake the general assumption that ‘the best Scholemaster of our time, was the greatest beater.’ As a grammar ...”