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“... and victim, a virgin forever being interfered with by corrupt and powerful old men, a dewy David battling the thug Goliath. And people, the people apparently, have loved it. They love him being rich, having his own island in the sun, shaming the suits at board meetings, tieless in jumpers knitted by his auntie, getting drunk and randy, blowing millions ...”

“... the cry: ‘The Turk must go!’ At the beginning of 1916, the Turk was not going anywhere: he held fast at Gallipoli, driving off the Allied landings in January, and accepted the surrender of a British Mesopotamian invasion force at Kut, south of Baghdad, in April. The Turkish war was both unsuccessful and unpopular. In the view of the new Imperial ...”

“... a native-born Frenchwoman.’ She was ‘La Bolaing’. So far so good. But how it was that Anne held out for marriage rather than a more conventional relationship, and why Henry allowed her to dictate her terms when his original intention was to make her his mistress, are other questions altogether. Henry was already trying to free himself from the ...”

“... and Vermeer – I started to stumble. It may seem notable that, say, Samuel Johnson and David Garrick set off together to conquer London from Lichfield, or that Emile Zola and Paul Cézanne were once classmates in Aix, but it’s not clear that such coincidences demand joint biographies, let alone overarching hypotheses.Snyder is proper in her ...”

“... Barzani had marshalled significant support not only from the US but from Iran and – thanks to David Ben-Gurion’s ‘periphery doctrine’, which advocated alliances with non-Arab forces in the region – from Israel too. Increased military assistance, advice and training turned a local insurgency into a regional conflict by proxy. When the Baath took ...”

“... essay ‘The Responsibility of Peoples’. Macdonald asked why, if the German people were to be held responsible for Nazi atrocities, the American people were not thought responsible for the saturation bombing of Tokyo and Dresden, as well as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Two decades later, the question shaped Chomsky’s response to the ...”

“... Walton. The most plausible model for Day’s master, the fictional Earl of Wessex – a title now held by Prince Edward, who is supposed to have chosen it after watching Colin Firth play a character called Lord Wessex in the film Shakespeare in Love – is the Earl of Ilchester. Whenever Hardy first heard of the courser, the critical fact is that in his ...”

“... to two Angolan women called Esperance and Brancke; Bastiaan Ferdinando of São Tomé (an island held by the Portuguese in the Gulf of Guinea) to Maria Bastiaans from Angola. Serafina and Bastiaan witnessed the marriage of Anthony from Angola to Leonora Fonçeka of Brazil. Soon, the children of these unions began to appear in the baptismal records of the ...”

“... For years, the historical society responsible for the site quibbled with local activists who held that it was important to memorialise the fact that Ona ‘Oney’ Judge, an enslaved woman forced to work for Washington, had lived there too, and to let people visit her quarters. The President’s House is a mile north-east of the former Frederick Douglass ...”

“... satin and Egyptian beads, and was painted by Augustus John in silks that don’t look too dusty. David Piper called it ‘the only existing humane portrait of a Lady Don’ and Harrison was pleased, thinking she looked ‘like a distinguished prize-fighter who has had a vision and collapsed under it’. Wade’s account of her life is in tune with the ...”

“... and its immobilisation in infrastructure – a ‘spatial fix’, in the words of the geographer David Harvey – is one progenitor of Xi’s grand initiative. China’s treatment by the US is another.In October 2011, Obama’s then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, announced the birth of ‘America’s Pacific Century’ in an article for Foreign ...”

“... that they would be allowed to leave the Great Bitter Lake and were anxious that they might be held to ransom indefinitely by the Egyptian government.They were right to worry. There was a precedent for seafarers being made legally responsible for their ships and detained. Just fifty miles away, Muhammad Aisha, a Syrian seafarer, was being forced to remain ...”

“... at the gates of the Kremlin, claiming to be the personal emissary of the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, and demanding an audience with Lenin. He was persuasive enough to be let in and managed to talk his way as far as the chairman’s secretary, if not all the way to Lenin himself. Wary Bolshevik officials summoned the newly appointed British ...”

“... is one source for the Hanged Man tarot card. All these examples attest to what the art historian David Freedberg calls ‘the power of images’, which more puritanical critics might see as fetishism writ large. ‘To be adored or punished, to be welcomed, dreaded, or expelled,’ Heller-Roazen concludes, ‘the image of the absentee is each time ...”

“... on a stock image developed over centuries, by painters especially. Brueghel in the 16th century, David Teniers in the 17th, and Joseph Wright in the 18th, all painted grimy scenes of reclusion and penury, with hints of mad obsession and radiant wonder. Cornelis Pietersz Bega’s alchemist, from 1663, adds pathos to the mix: were it not for the delicately ...”