“... or precluding hauteur; Ingres would rediscover the immaculate enamelled gradations of Holbein; and David invent poses and discover expressions which would give concrete form to abstract notions about new men in a new society. When the idea that mystery and natural authority attach to privilege became absurd, Sargent would still be able to give it a certain ...”

“... North London suburb and in New York, bears the impress of American writers like Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, clever, nervy exhibitionists, IQs-with-i-Books, guys who, as Smith has put it, ‘know things’, writers with a gift for speedy cultural analysis, whose prose is choppy with interruption. The Autograph Man may indeed be the nearest that a ...”

“... wives was chauvinistically called talk with ‘the night crow’) is totally inaccessible, which means that, with Donald Rumsfeld, we need to know what we do not know. In establishing who Anne Boleyn was, in appearance, behaviour and allure, Ives has little to add to the penetrating detective work which he carried out in the 1980s. Several alleged portraits ...”

“... in fact New Labour avant la lettre. Mullin is well aware that taking the paymaster’s shilling means forsaking his independence. As a parliamentary life form, junior ministers are even more amoebic than backbench MPs, who can at least hope to leave their mark by sponsoring a private member’s bill, select committee membership, tenacious single-issue ...”

“... and Vermeer – I started to stumble. It may seem notable that, say, Samuel Johnson and David Garrick set off together to conquer London from Lichfield, or that Emile Zola and Paul Cézanne were once classmates in Aix, but it’s not clear that such coincidences demand joint biographies, let alone overarching hypotheses.Snyder is proper in her ...”

“... Turks or Persians, they were in each case under the boot of a central regime prepared to use any means necessary to stifle the merest hint of autonomous sentiment. Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria – despite their abiding differences in other areas – would at times band together to hold down the Kurds, sharing intelligence and co-ordinating security ...”

“... such as the Webbs. Tawney opposed the Webbs’ proposals for a national minimum wage. ‘It means that people are not paid what they are worth,’ he argued, ‘but what is necessary to keep them working.’ Tawney rose to public prominence in 1919 when he defended the rights of miners at the Royal Commission on the Coal Industry. His ...”

“... dramatised, his master’s compositions. Rembrandt later returned to the subject, at least twice. David de Witt suggests in his catalogue essay that it wasn’t the subject, an exotic conversion story long interpreted in terms of the whitening of the soul by Christian baptism, that encouraged this flurry of painted renditions, so much as the pretext it gave ...”

“... required that the actual source of motive power be obscured. Fressoz acknowledges his debt to David Edgerton, who argued in The Shock of the Old (2006) that we do not understand modernity because of our fixation on innovation and our lack of interest in the way systems of production operate. Accounts of contemporary reality organised around technological ...”

“... of such a state on managerial-centralist lines, which he hadn’t foreseen or intended as the means to conquer the ‘five giants’ described in his report: ‘Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness’.During 1942 Churchill’s position sometimes seemed precarious, as two years of relentless defeat culminated in the fall of Singapore in February ...”

“... the last twenty years. Labour was well ahead of the Conservatives in the polls. The Tory leader, David Cameron, was in a difficult phase, no longer a fresh figure after a year and a half in charge, and facing growing internal opposition to his liberalisation strategy. Brown, long regarded at Westminster and by the media as a ruthless operator, was widely ...”

“... inquiry into serious crimes for a political reason. There had to be a plot, to remove him by other means. And Chief Constable Colin Sampson drew the short straw as metteur-en-scène. So John Stalker is in the wilderness. Suddenly the Police Force he has been running in Manchester has run him out of town; and as he mows the lawn at home he has time to reflect ...”

“... Oxford Books have been anything from six hundred pages to a thousand; Davie’s predecessor David Cecil’s Christian Verse was six hundred, while Davie runs to not more than half that. Where Cecil’s 1940 volume gave 40 pages to Browning and 14 to Coventry Patmore, in Davie both poets have sunk without trace. But such disappearances are only ...”

“... us – but he has made it his stock-in-trade. It does not make for intimacy of collaboration, as David Owen recognised in coining the soubriquet ‘le Roi lean Quinze’. The point about the grand manner is that it only really comes off in context, when the level of events rises to match it. They laughed at Macmillan, until he became prime minister, and at ...”

“... first dawning sense of the historicity of society so rudely awakened by the French Revolution. David Wittenberg does much better than this, but his remarkable hypothesis is only one of the conceptual breakthroughs in this stimulating contribution to literary theory. I will dwell mainly on the three that interest me the most: the relationship of SF to ...”