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“... a proposal for American independence. John Adams hops back and forth, his diction slicing the King’s English into definitive new states. Thomas Jefferson, dressed in mauve, so sexual he can barely speak coherently, lounges on the window seat in a soft-focus rapist’s reverie, dreaming of not freeing his slaves after he dies. His wife sings a ...”

“... all his thoughts as Death clogs his failing body through space and time. There. Done. The Pale King never needed to happen, nor all the rest of it. Though there is one thing we wouldn’t want to lose: a character named Mr Bussy. That’s how I felt before I read it, anyway. Criticism of the book at the time, less uneasy in its knowledge of Wallace (in ...”

“... from the first volume of Charles Moore’s exhaustive and exhausting authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, which takes the story up to the Falklands War in 1982. The person on display here is not more intelligent than her rivals, or more principled. She chops and changes as much as they do. But she is a lot more relentless: if anything, she keeps ...”

“... added point when joined to the now fashionable question whether the current political dominance of Margaret Thatcher is not simply a function of an opposition which is not only disastrously divided but exceptionally feeble. One needn’t be quite as scathing about Neil Kinnock as R.W. Johnson has recently been in these columns in order to agree with him that ...”

“... sequence, in which the nightmare of Indira Gandhi is fused with the equally nightmarish figure of Margaret Hamilton; a coming-together of the Wicked Witches of the East and of the West.’ There are other examples of Rushdie’s criticism of the film passing into criticism and advocacy of his own work: ‘But of all movies, the one that helped me most as I ...”

“... for his group portrait in the sacristy of El Escorial, La Sagrada Forma, which shows the King kneeling before the miraculous host of Gorkum, which had shed blood when profaned by the Protestants in 1572. Soria dismissed Coello as someone who had done no more than ‘pave the way for the superficial, playful Rococo’, but Brown calls La Sagrada Forma ...”

“... that Corinne Weston’s emphasis on the emergence of ‘the co-ordination principle’ between king, lords and commons after 1642, is shaped at least in some degree by the need to seek out an ancestry for the separation of powers. By contrast, Joyce Appleby’s essay is valuable in large part because it stresses what was un-English about the 18th-century ...”

“... milk flowed from St Catherine’s headless body instead of blood. But even he draws the line at St Margaret. In her prison cell, the saint is supposed to have been swallowed alive by the devil in the form of a dragon but, by signing herself with the cross, she made its body burst open to emerge unscathed. That part of her legend, Jacobus admits, ‘is ...”

“... without naming him, the same figure in the future, wearing what would be his face tomorrow: the king who in Henry V, disguised, fraternises with his soldiers on the eve of battle, and realises that only ‘ceremony’, and, in Wheeler’s gloss, ‘secrecy, mystery, inscrutability, silence’, raises him above them. The heart’s ease of talk is ‘within ...”

“... that Shelley published – Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire (1810), Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson (1810) – his broadsheet, The Devil’s Walk (1812), and a fascinating book-length poem he did not manage to publish: ‘The Wandering Jew; or, The Victim of the Eternal Avenger’ (written 1809-10). There are also ‘Ten Early Poems’, most ...”

“... it as a transit camp for captured enemy pilots. The US army took it over in 1946, renamed it Camp King and used it for ‘special interrogations’, involving torture, beatings and drug injections, carried out by Counterintelligence Corps officers known as ‘rough boys’. The disposal of bodies was, one CIA officer recalled, ‘no problem’.The ‘rough ...”

“... even a dead Enemy might bite back.) Still more complex was his relationship with Eliot. Professor King suggests that Eliot was for Read a father figure ‘whom he could emulate, rebel against and, at times, loathe’, and that seems about right. Eliot published Read’s poems, his essays, and some of his books about art, but at times was sharply critical of ...”

“... know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king and of a king of England too’), yet how unlike it all was to the home life of our own dear Queen. Even 20th-century feminists have complained that, apart from declining to realise herself fully as a woman, she did ...”

“... realism’; but her realism is seldom deep enough to warrant its self-consciousness. Margaret Drabble appears to want to combine Dickens and Woolf, to combine caricature and experimental forms, but can create neither vivid caricatures nor daring experiments. Martin Amis seems to want to borrow that very faculty – soul – about which he is most ...”

“... earlier, in 1611, in a decision known as the Case of Proclamations, it had been ruled that ‘the King by his proclamation or other ways cannot change any part of the common law, or statute law, or the customs of the realm … The King hath no prerogative, but that which the law of the land allows him.’ It gave a key to ...”