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“... same time Obrist pays homage to serious curators who were not primarily provocateurs: the German Alexander Dorner, who directed the Hanover Museum from 1925 until he was ousted by the Nazis in 1937, commissioned avant-garde artists to design radical exhibition schemes; the Dutch Willem Sandberg, a member of the Resistance, who as curator and director of the ...”

“... should be, that influence has occasioned remarkably little anxiety in the younger poets, such as Robert Crawford, Liz Lochead, W.N. Herbert, Kathleen Jamie and Jackie Kay, who have learned from him. In Edwin Morgan: Inventions of Modernity, Colin Nicholson tries to account for his many-sided subject by examining him facet by facet, but the result is rather ...”

“... English political nation a great deal, but in 1603 the skilful diplomacy of her chief minister, Robert Cecil, escorted James VI, King of Scots, to the thrones of England and Ireland, with far less fuss than everyone had feared. The entire archipelago was for the first time in its history united under a single monarch, and moreover under the ruler of the ...”

“... general assumption was that Prince Albert had provided the definitive and approved working model. Robert Rhodes James has written an entertaining and effective but oddly out-of-kilter book about that model. His standard texts appear to be Justin McCarthy and H.A.L. Fisher, historians whose reputations had faded when Mr James was a schoolboy under Sir Roger ...”

“... moment, when a world dominated by classical poleis suddenly changed into a world dominated by Alexander and hellenistic kings. But in terms of style, a better comparison is with Demosthenes’ rival Aeschines, less bombastic, more varied in tone and equally deft in his use of comedic ventriloquies. But Cicero goes one step further than Aeschines by ...”

“... in, and she enters the crypt alone. ‘Three kinds of space dominate all Tarkovsky’s films,’ Robert Bird writes: ‘nature, the home, and the shrine or cathedral.’ The ‘cathedral space is demonstrated most fully at the beginning of Nostalghia . . . in the rigorously geometrical yet disconcertingly elusive space of a columned crypt’. One reason ...”

“... of the 1720s and 30s she acted as an unofficial but much courted member of the Opposition to Sir Robert Walpole’s Administration. She exerted the electoral patronage she possessed on her landed estates, and especially in Woodstock and St Albans, in favour of Opposition candidates. She used the marital alliances of her daughters and granddaughters with a ...”

“... see my letters are scribbled with all the carelessness & inattention imaginable,’ Alexander Pope claimed in a missive of November 1712. ‘My style, like my soul, appears in its natural undress before my friend.’ When Hester Piozzi wrote in 1788 that personal letters were ‘familiar chat spread upon paper’ she was parroting a line at ...”

“... as Belphoebe, Diana, a goddess supreme, never fully forgave him. Ralegh wrote a letter to Sir Robert Cecil from the Tower which was probably intended to be shown to the queen in order to win back her favour. The letter displays Ralegh at his best and worst. It’s a monstrous blast of self-pity, tempered by his characteristic half-belief in his own ...”

“... wife, Anne of Bohemia, he may not have desired her sexually. His favourite and probable lover, Robert de Vere, also stayed childless through two marriages. Richard may have taken perverse comfort in his failure to beget a successor because it made him seem indispensable. Two hundred years later, another childless monarch, Elizabeth I, had John Hayward ...”

“... here – as are the movies and documentaries, with Albert Finney following Richard Burton and Robert Hardy as a screen Churchill. As for approval ratings, in an admittedly contrived phone-poll BBC2 viewers last November voted him the greatest Briton of all time. Most Churchill biographies have been massive: Roy Jenkins’s weighed in at 1.5 kilos and a ...”

“... 1895 were busy for Oscar Wilde. In late January he was in Algiers with Alfred Douglas. He wrote to Robert Ross: ‘There is a great deal of beauty here. The Kabyle boys are quite lovely. At first we had some difficulty procuring a proper civilised guide. But now it is all right and Bosie and I have taken to haschish: it is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke ...”

“... with direct or indirect consequences for composers from Frank Bridge to Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr (both the last mentioned have matured into a style informed by a concept of modal tonality), and from Messiaen to Pierre Boulez – whose orchestral Rituel in memoriam Maderna (1974) rescinds ‘total serialism’ and plumps (as Dominique Jameux ...”

“... have come from transatlantic scholars such as John C. Cairns, Philip Bankwitz, Telford Taylor and Robert O. Paxton. Eleanor M. Gates might modestly disclaim inclusion in such distinguished company. But she has produced a splendid book which is both instructive and moving. She is not much interested in the military operations per se, but excels in her ...”

“... to have been less thorough than one might wish, to judge by a number of minor slips, such as that Robert Oppenheimer escaped from Germany, or that the Uranium-235 bomb is started by firing two hemispherical pieces together. He blames Alexander, Minister of Defence in 1947, for basing military planning on the ill-conceived ...”