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“... various 1960s radical movements, sanctify the modern state? Lilla doesn’t even ask the question. Martin Luther King, whatever else he may have been, was a liberal Protestant root and branch. Might he, too, be relevant to Lilla’s story? Some of what Lilla misses is encapsulated in the proceedings of a meeting of 377 ...”

“... Europe thought we did. They thought it was just Cold War bullshit.’ James Earl Ray, killer of Martin Luther King Jr, obviously had help from the establishment, as did John Wilkes Booth, who did away with Lincoln. As Finn says, not everyone believes that Booth was really gunned down eleven days after the assassination in ...”

“... preference. By the time we meet Hickory Spit, the FBI agent who led the effort to discredit Martin Luther King, who can ‘barely wipe his own ass’, considers George W. Bush ‘an intellectual elite’ and is ‘in love with the current clown’, and then the ‘clown’ himself, who gets stuck under the desk in the ...”

“... swooned over Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember, and sung and danced with Yul Brynner in The King and I. This is a way of saying she wasn’t the twenty-year-old girl of ‘The Turn of the Screw’, had not lived what James called ‘a small, smothered life’, and was most unlikely not to have seen herself full-length in a mirror before she got to the ...”

“... very well since. Kenneth Anger has been this kind of wallflower at the orgy for years. The dragon king of gorgeous Hollywood has him in thrall. His snappy chapter-headings (‘Closely Observed Blondes’, ‘Babylon Boozers’, ‘Hollywood Drugstore’) give a promise that is always kept. A sample from another chapter (‘The Magic of Self-Murder’) conveys ...”

“... Alexis St Martin was one of the 19th century’s most important scientific guinea pigs. In 1822, the illiterate young French-Canadian was working as a ‘voyageur’ for John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading company in northern Michigan. He was hanging out with a bunch of rowdies in the company store when a shotgun accidentally went off and he was hit below his left nipple ...”

“... Václav Havel’s life would seem to be an unrivalled success story: the Philosopher-King, a man who combines political power with a global moral authority comparable only to that of the Pope, the Dalai Lama or Nelson Mandela. And just as at the end of a fairy tale when the hero is rewarded for all his suffering by marrying the princess, he is married to a beautiful movie actress ...”

“... requires another party if it is to be more than assent. It happens within the heart (according to King John) but becomes consent only when it is declared. The word could mean, as now, agreement to a proposal, but Shakespeare’s plays reflect social conditions in which consent between lovers depends on the consent given by friends and family. As Petruchio ...”

“... him. The first significant one, published in 1926, was the account by the Austrian psychiatrist Martin Pappenheim of his conversations with Princip in his prison cell. But only one work is essential: fifty years after it first appeared, Vladimir Dedijer’s The Road to Sarajevo is still unsurpassed. Dedijer isn’t concerned with the assassin’s ...”

“... that the Serbs had – ‘If you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ’em’ – was hailed by Martin Amis as a ‘great sayer of the unsayable’. Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within (2006) was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award, prompting one judge, Eliot Weinberger, to denounce Bawer ...”

“... into the swamp. Which’s all the thanks he gets. Still, when Lestat’s buoyed up again on the King tide, regurgitated   so to speak, an infuriated Witi burns down the house.     Downs another bourbon; and on the proceeds   from Sunday’s fund-raising carwash, flees with Helena to Europe where they melt into the crowd. She’s got red curly ...”

“... I hope scholarly ghost. The project was to write a history of the sculpture department at St Martin’s School of Art. Anthony Caro invited me to do it, and the idea was that the book would be a tribute to Frank Martin, the head of the department, and would be published in the year of his retirement. Caro and ...”

“... on to Malta and then to England, where she arrived in June 1827 and was taken to Windsor. The king had her fed on a supposedly nourishing diet of milk, ordered a warm and commodious stable to be constructed for her comfort, and commissioned portraits of her from three painters. But she didn’t thrive. Her head began to droop and physicians were ...”

“... precedent that the House could make law without the participation of the House of Lords or of the king. He had established the right of electors to elect whomever they please and the principle that no constituency could be represented by anyone they had not elected. He had brought before the British public the injustices of the electoral system and the need ...”

“... is vividly symbolised in Egypt by the physical link between the library and the (dead) body of the king. So, for example, long before the foundation of the Hellenistic library of Alexandria the tomb of the pharaoh Rameses II had contained a renowned ‘sacred library’; and just next to the Alexandrian Museum itself was the Soma (literally ‘the ...”