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“... and the character is a figure who is experiencing that juxtaposition at first hand. In The Monkey King (1978), Mo’s first novel, the meeting of worlds takes a deceptively domestic form – so much so, in fact, that one might have mistaken the author for a sort of half-Cantonese would-be Barbara Pym, a candidate member of the school of downbeat English ...”

“... equalled the misguided obsessiveness of Bob Woodward’s recent life of the drug-addicted comedian John Belushi, and, it should be added, few have been so telling or so readable as Indecent Exposure, David McClintick’s relentlessly documented account of the scandalous behaviour of the unsinkable executive David Begelman. Film and television documentarists ...”

“... overthrew the Medici in November 1494, which resulted from the arrival in the region of the French King Charles VIII with a large army and which was mounted by members of the Florentine political aristocracy: indeed, up to that time he had, as head of a convent which was a Medici foundation, naturally rather genuflected to the family. His main ...”

“... Byron is the prototype of the first, Wordsworth of the second. The great Goethe was, in his time, king and emperor of both, and highly revered for it. In love with their fates, condemned by these to some suitable agony, the dramatisers had a more spectacular but more painful time of it than those whom Keats rather unfairly refers to as ‘large ...”

“... had been the Duke of Windsor’s mistress before marriage and that England’s recently abdicated king sometimes drank too much. A writ was served and the action heard before the Lord Chief Justice, who declared in court that ‘these particular libels, a jury might think, appear almost to invite a thoroughly efficient horse-whipping.’ Author and publisher ...”

“... that nice Susannah York. Fielding died in 1754 and was succeeded at Bow Street by his half-brother John: ‘blind John’ as he had been since the age of 19, ‘Sir John’ as he became in 1761, after successfully agitating to be knighted so as to increase the prestige of his office. The ...”

“... lodge, and, when they failed to recant, to be racked in the Tower.’ He searched his friend John Petit’s house for heretical literature and left him in prison, untried. He applauded the burning of a harmless leather seller called John Tewkesbury, noting: ‘There never was a wretch, I wene, better worthy.’ And he ...”

“... Mark Griffiths: his elaborately illustrated essay, ‘Face to Face with Shakespeare’, focused on John Gerard’s well-known Elizabethan manual of botany, The Herball or, General Historie of Plantes, and purported to demonstrate that one of the four seemingly allegoric figures on its ornamental title-page – a figure clad in a Roman costume and crowned with ...”

“... How I got into this. John Sturrock called from the LRB. He knows that I like opera a lot, and that I now and then get tired of writing papers about the mind/body problem for philosophy journals. ‘Would I like to report on the new pop version of Aida? (Elton John, Tim Rice and, rumour has it, a transparent swimming-pool ...”

“... At the treason trials, the law officers claimed that the LCS was leading a plot to depose the King and usurp the powers of government, but the juries rejected this claim each time it was put before them, no doubt because it relied on arguments about what would count as usurpation and deposition which were figurative and technical to the point of ...”

“... both his friends and his enemies feared, with good reason, that he intended to make himself king, a title hated by republican aristocrats with a nearly superstitious fervour. Augustus, however, disclaimed regal ambitions and presented his new regime as a restoration of the republic, even though all real military power, and pretty much all civil ...”

“... and was among those executed after the rebellion. ‘The play,’ he averred, ‘was of King Harry the 4th, and of the killing of King Richard II.’ Third, on 18 February, one of the players, Augustine Phillips, in signed testimony given under oath, described the play as ‘the play of the deposing and killing of ...”

“... later, Cromwell became Lord Protector. Under the Instrument of Government, devised mostly by John Lambert, his mercurial but talented associate, he ruled until his death in September 1658, assisted by a Council of State, in theory chosen by Parliament but in practice chosen by Cromwell himself from among his friends and relations and army comrades. This ...”

“... History of Reynard the Fox into colloquial modern English. The book opens with the lion, the king of the beasts, calling the animals to court to celebrate the feast of Pentecost. The first thing we learn about Reynard is that he doesn’t want to go. The second thing we learn is that he doesn’t want to go because he has pissed on the faces of the ...”

“... she ends up in her old job as barmaid at the Midnight Bell. It is instructive to compare John Updike’s literary persona with that of Hamilton, for in many ways they have almost exactly the same kind of talents. Both are experts in the area where social comedy abuts on the most precise instinct for what a society is like, and what details and ...”