“... were ‘All is well with the general.’ William Oughtred’s first words were ‘Are you sure the King is restored?’ Elvis Presley’s first words were ‘I hope you have not been bored.’ General Alfredo Quijano’s first words were ‘Still a little closer.’ Maximilien de Robespierre’s first words were ‘Thank you, sir.’ Gertrude Stein’s first ...”

“... one of the numerous sequels. True, pity for the creature was nothing new in giant monster movies: King Kong (1933) – re-released in 1952 – is an obvious template. But for an exercise in ‘cultural scab-picking’, as one anonymous fan has called it on the internet, Gojira seems peculiarly concerned to invest its star attraction with pathos. In the eerie ...”

“... Yet tonight the cemetery of hope and idealism is empty. Jack Kennedy is alive. Martin Luther King is alive. Bobby Kennedy is alive. James Baldwin is alive. Janis Joplin is alive. Jack Kerouac is alive. Jimi Hendrix is alive. Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a ...”

“... of the epic, what Van Nortwick calls its centripetal drive towards Odysseus’ restoration as king, husband, father and son (as if nothing has changed in his twenty years of absence), and its centrifugal delays, both his wanderings and his protracted period in disguise as a beggar on Ithaca. One side of the hero, the side that compels him to listen to the ...”

“... of treasons drawn up in 1351, it was an offence to ‘compass or imagine the death of our lord the king’. The meaning of these strange words was already archaic in the early 1790s when William Pitt’s Government brought an array of British radical reformers to trial for high treason. The words ‘compass’ and ‘imagine’ had entered the English language ...”

“... of 1958, a Council of Ministers is responsible for the budget and internal affairs, but only the King can legislate, publish laws, treaties and concessions. A decree of 1961 forbids the formation of political parties, and prohibits the profession of any ideology other than ‘Islam’. Anyone engaging in ‘violent action against the state or the royal ...”

“... to the pope, but b) not to allow anything in this first oath to oblige him to act against the king or make him ‘any the less free to speak or less able to advise and assent to anything which might further the reformation of the Christian religion’. As his successor, Reginald Pole, wisecracked a few weeks later, ‘other perjurers be wont to break ...”

“... of the French Cistercian order, ‘established in the old Middleland of Cumbria by a Scottish king on what became English soil’. Feudal dynasties such as the Bruces and the Balliols held estates on both sides of the porous border. In the late 11th century, the Normans appropriated Hadrian’s Wall as a convenient borderline, turning Roman forts into ...”

“... Piedmontese. Maximilian was so depressed he dreamed of becoming Belgian, like his father-in-law, King Leopold. A Saxe-Coburg princeling whose first wife had died in childbirth before she could inherit the British throne, Leopold had been installed as king of the new Belgian state created by the 1830 revolutions. Having ...”

“... direct action. He was the youngest speaker at the March on Washington in 1963, where Martin Luther King delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ address.On many occasions, Lewis courted beatings and arrest in order to bring attention to the racial mistreatment that was pervasive in the Jim Crow South. In Selma, Alabama, on 7 March 1965, he led marchers who were ...”

“... almost to destruction in 1936-37. The crisis had three phases, of which the actual abdication of King Edward VIII was only the most visible. The monarchy had already been placed under acute strain by Edward’s unkingly conduct in the few months since his father’s death – his feckless hedonism, his dangerous political naivety and his neglect of the more ...”

“... mindful of his Christian faith. He flattered Louis XIV but denounced monarchs who, like the Sun King, made war and generated misery. Although he wrote about fields and farmyards and celebrated rural quiet, he was a devout Parisian and addicted to salon talk. He wrote decorously of love but frequented taverns and brothels, and his sunny verse was the product ...”

“... The archbishop of Paris fretted to the prime minister that it could lead to the beheading of the king, ‘as is done in England’. Until the 1750s, the quarrel excited considerably more attention in France than the writings of a few daring philosophes. By the time of the Girard-Cadière affair, the quarrel had become extremely unequal. The pope, the ...”

“... the overthrow of the Ancien Régime – including the thousands of Parisian women who forced the king and court to abandon Versailles on 6 October 1789 – and calls for women’s equality were especially strong in the early years of the revolution. In 1790, the mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet demanded full civil rights for women: ‘Why ...”

“... main London dealer and worked with both Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. Brausen asked the young David Sylvester to write something for the catalogue. His response remains acute: Richier, he declared, asks ‘not only how much damage the human body can endure and still remain human, but also how far the human body can be twisted into the shape of sub-human ...”