“... in North Cork from her dead cousin and lover, Guy Montefort. She now lives there with Guy’s former fiancée, Lilia, whom she has married off to Fred Danby, an illegitimate cousin. Fred truculently farms the estate. He and Lilia have two children, Jane and Maud. Cousins, of course, bring with them a plentiful supply of aunts and uncles. Nothing could ...”

“... money spent the third.”’) Training sometimes began early. Helena Beatson, Read’s niece and pupil, presented her first narrative scenes at the age of eight at the 1771 Society of Artists show; by the time she was twelve, she was done with exhibiting. The artist Ellen Sharples had her eight-year-old daughter, Rolinda, read Catrou and Rouillé’s Roman ...”

“... common-sense wisdom to Johanna’s enlightened conceptualism. She has learnt most of this from a former lover, Eberhard (modelled on Otto Gross, Freud’s pupil, for whom the phrase ‘spaced-out’ – indeed all the terms of the drug culture and hippiedom – might have been coined). So she thinks you can be ...”

“... while leaving its subjects to get on with their private affairs. Ultimately, they chose the former. As Baker wrote in Inventing the French Revolution (1990), it was a choice of unity over difference, will over reason, virtue over commerce, and absolute sovereignty over limited government. Now, through Marat, Baker is attempting to make sense of the way ...”

“... the bastard child of the union? And why do the mullahs of Yorkshire so much resent a brilliant pupil who has the Angrez themselves waiting upon his dexterous and subtle annexation of their greatest and most treasured resource – their language? It can’t just be the politicisation of religion, because Rushdie long ago argued by allegory that religion ...”

“... makes him feel all the more cut off. He appears to believe in socialism, yet his only friend, the former student Razumikhin, is a conservative and disquietingly thick with functionaries of the law. A minor figure, Lebeziatnikov, is lumped together with Raskolnikov by a spiteful person as one of a pair of ‘notorious infidels, agitators and ...”

“... become chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Joe ‘Morning Joe’ Scarborough, the former Republican congressman turned TV talk show host. Marjorie Merriweather Post, heiress to the Post cereal fortune, collector of Russian art, Fabergé eggs and husbands, built the lavish 126-room estate in 1927. She left her art to the Hillwood Museum, which ...”

“... from beyond the grave. The polemic extends even to the present reviewer, who was as it happens a pupil of Herbert Butterfield, a principal opponent of Namier, and has spent his life happily engaged in a branch of English history which Namier considered ‘flapdoodle’. On the minor issues between us, Dr O’Brien makes some sound factual points; the larger ...”

“... Panofsky have been at pains to stress the interdependence of connoisseurship and art history. The former, wrote Panofsky in Meaning and the Visual Arts, was only a more laconic form of the latter, just as art history was a ‘more loquacious form of connoisseurship’. It was no surprise, then, that the 20th anniversary of Berenson’s death last year was ...”

“... In 1954, I was a pupil at Les Dames de Marie, a French-speaking convent school in an expansive and pastoral suburb of Brussels. Every morning, as we crocodile-filed into our classrooms, we sang patriotic hymns. One of these, the ‘Marche Lorraine’, has a rousing chorus; in rapid ascending arpeggios as in a trumpet voluntary, we blasted out a paean to ‘the young shepherdess in clogs and woollen skirt’ who took up arms and walked out fearlessly to confront her king and restore him to his throne ...”

“... writing in honour of Polgar’s 60th birthday, Roth said that he considered himself Polgar’s pupil: ‘He polishes the ordinary until it becomes extraordinary ... I have learned this verbal carefulness from him.’ The brevity of the feuilleton put every sentence under pressure, packing it with twice the usual energy. Polgar, in one of his ...”

“... modernity with a revival of sovereign traditions that colonialism had stifled or exploited? Many former colonies were faced with the same contradiction, but Morocco would soon become an unsavoury mixture of repression and conspicuous wealth: for the palace, private jets, golf courses, a portfolio of lavish properties inside and outside the country; for armed ...”

“... things that have been happening there. Also at the dacha is a friend of his father’s, Berton, a former astronaut who has been to Solaris and witnessed the strange happenings, but whose report Kris dismisses as unreliable. Berton leaves, angry, and the film goes with him along the highways and through the tunnels of a big city. An extended, arresting ...”

“... that ‘the best Scholemaster of our time, was the greatest beater.’ As a grammar school pupil and (if Aubrey is to be believed) a sometime teacher himself, Shakespeare must have been familiar with both sides of this disciplinary regime; and his references to schoolboys, as Colin Burrow observes, ‘tend to go along with sighing, crying or ...”

“... a detention; two strikes and it’s a longer detention or you’re out of the class. In 2015 pupil exclusion rates in Hackney schools were 25 per cent higher than the national average.Since leaving City, I’ve visited several schools to take a look at the way they do things, including some where the teachers are not in the habit of challenging poor ...”