Sublime

Rupert Grant was a clever young fellow, but he had that tendency which youth and cleverness, when sharply combined, so often produce, a somewhat extravagant scepticism.

And sitting cross-legged in the throne is Herne. He wears a long tunic of rotten pelts, home to whole dynasties of moth and maggot. In this aspect he has an empty deer skull for a head, but he can take any aspect that he wants: a huntsman with his bow, or a warrior with holly leaves for flesh. He is Cernunnos, the Horned God of beasts and trees and

Literary men are being employed to praise a big business man personally, as men used to praise a king.

Edward VII ruled the British Empire with a slightly pudgy cigar-stained hand, assuring his subjects that duty was important but so too was fun. “It doesn’t matter what you do,” he said, “so long as you don’t frighten the horses.”

And Lord Randolph’s elder brother was, in the words of an eminent modern historian, ‘one of the most disreputable men ever to have debased the highest rank in the British peerage’.1 He appropriately bore the name of Blandford, the title of the Marlborough heir, for most of his relatively short life, during which he was expelled from Eton, got