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Far more incendiary than calling for Mr. Prayuth’s exit are the protesters’ demands that the king, one of the world’s richest monarchs, must hew to the Constitution rather than floating above it as a semidivine being.

“According to the rules,” said Urvashi, smiling cruelly, “it must be unanimously agreed by the Guardians in residence that we believe they are semidivine. I do not believe. And if they’re only children, they shouldn’t bother.”

Mark and Karen’s disintegrating marriage is the main concern of Heather, the Totality, rather than Heather herself, who is so impossibly idealized as to seem semidivine.

At a time when monarchs were regarded as semidivine beings who could cure diseases with the royal touch, he despised religion as a farrago of nonsense, avoided court life, doffed his hat to ordinary Prussians and encouraged inoculation against smallpox.

Transformation cannot be complete, she writes, unless certain Islamic precepts are “repudiated and nullified,” including “Mohammed’s semidivine and infallible status along with the literalist reading of the Quran.”