“... from you? You see what has been achieved, but it is harder to imagine Velázquez making his mark than it is to imagine Ingres touching in one of his smooth cheeks. Velázquez: The Technique of Genius is an illuminating introduction to what can be learnt from the surface of the pictures. (Both authors have written at length about Velázquez in other ...”

“... so now. In Germany, the opinion polls show majorities that are opposed to the replacement of the D-mark while, simultaneously, being resigned to its disappearance. Senior MPs of both Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union and the opposition Social Democrats have told each other not to discuss the Maastricht deficit criteria because they might unsettle a) the ...”

“... and epigraphs are the names and catalogue descriptions of roses. In the novel the isolation of a rose-garden, the luxurious vice of gardening, the reader’s consciousness of literary cultivation taking place amid generic borders, all summon a broad background of traditions and values which are tested against the sharply contemporary commitments to self, job ...”

“... a thoroughfare they must have, free and unmolested.’ Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt left its mark on the British political elite. He had made no secret of his ambition to supplant the British in India, and his brief campaign suggested that he might try either of the two obvious routes: via Suez and the Red Sea, or up through Syria, east to the Tigris and ...”

“... to exchange dreams and memories, above all to argue with him, then we get such superb stories as A Rose for Emily, or Go down Moses, or that splendid saga The Bear (but firmly cutting out the addenda), or that weird, haunting half-fantasy about aboriginal Indians which I do not even pretend to understand called Red Leaves, or we get his three time-outlasting ...”

“... French. Perhaps there is a lot to be said in favour of America after all. Does this correspondence mark a moment of significant change in the history of that anti-Americanism so often said to be traditional in France? The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism prints the proceedings of a symposium devoted to this question (the original French edition first appeared ...”

“... the carefree and the caring may not be Utopian, but it’s full of Blair’s millenarian ardour: Mark Rodol, managing director of the Ministry of Sound, calls the phenomenon ‘the biggest collaboration of young people since the Sixties’. ‘Tony Blair’s speech brought tears to my eyes,’ whimpered Noel Gallagher, from the rock-hard Oasis, after ...”

“... later, its myth of ‘the road’. Reading accounts of fast-food operations and franchises that rose meteorically and crashed even faster, we see the indomitable and often amoral drive to ingest and expand which still characterises American entrepreneurial culture. Ray Kroc, the hamburger guru of McDonald’s and pre-eminent fast-food entrepreneur, emerges ...”

“... the ruins of the twin buildings of the General Staff headquarters, built in the 1970s and clad in rose marble to evoke the canyon of the Sutjeska River in Bosnia-Herzegovina (the site of one of the more famous of Tito’s offensives). The Neoclassical Foreign Ministry across the road is hidden by scaffolding. On the pedestrianised Knez Mihajlova Street, the ...”

“... from a dwarfish man, and confronts her at home. She triumphantly reveals a tattoo of dagger and rose: ‘I felt dishonoured every time you touched me. I shall never let you touch me again.’ That’s about as good as heterosexual relations get in this book. In ‘The Crew from M6’ they are given even shorter shrift. A TV crew films a lesbian household in ...”

“... highways lay waste, the wayfaring man ceaseth.’ Rural England left nothing like the same mark on posterity as She or King Solomon’s Mines, but he said it cost him more labour than anything else.This wasn’t the first time that arable farmers had fallen victim to abrupt economic and technological change against which they proved powerless, both ...”

“... and looking at them, becoming involved with the stories they told. In many cases, the person rose vividly from the programme. The painter Mary Fedden, Catherine’s friend, was ‘celebrated’ at St James’s Church in Piccadilly on 18 October 2012. The event started with ‘The Painter’s Eye’, a talk by Philip Trevelyan, son of Mary’s late ...”

“... but here it was a spooky hooded figure sitting in front of a laptop, face obscured by a question mark, looking halfway between a hacker and the Grim Reaper.I waited all day for a reply and then, during my son’s bathtime, my phone rang. It was a video call from fake me. I watched the hooded figure glowing on my screen. With sudsy fingers, I answered and ...”

“... village of Le Moustier, on the road from Les Eyzies to Montignac, on 11 September 1910, to Alice Rose Champerret and Gaston Yves Champerret. But there was nothing more. David Martin put me in touch with Isabelle Dupois, who had worked as a housemaid at the château where the crate had been found. She told me that Champerret had been living in Paris when the ...”

“... On 25 January 1788, HMS Supply eased her way between the imposing sandstone cliffs that mark the entrance to Port Jackson and into a waterway that John White, the First Fleet’s surgeon, proclaimed as ‘the finest and most extensive harbour in the universe’. The hyperbole was perhaps understandable, for the Britons were seeing Sydney Harbour through eyes wearied by months at sea, and this was to be their new home ...”