“... painting published in 1992 revealed that although traces of the Cupid survived, he can never have held a bird. This should have been obvious all along: the picture has been in Dresden since 1699, and had the bird been visible while the Cupid was intact, someone in the 18th century would surely have identified the Venus as the one by Giorgione described by ...”

“... made a ‘five-figure contribution’; the rest was covered by the then owners of the hotel, David and Frederick Barclay, identical twins who appeared on the Sunday Times Rich List later that month with a combined fortune of £2.3 billion.This wasn’t the first time the Barclays had helped to house Thatcher. After leaving Number Ten she had moved into ...”

“... much zest into a feeble allegory. In his excellent critical biography of Tati, published in 1999, David Bellos points out that less than three years before he began shooting the film (in May 1947) the Gestapo still had an office on the main square of Sainte-Sévère. And now American movies and military policemen are the problem?Many of the best scenes in ...”

“... Dickensian asylum, or a ‘snake pit’. For that period, it was a decent place. Still, Elsie was held against her will and without anyone asking whether she should have been there.Archie was quite good at school but had no taste for it, and no need once his mother was gone. He preferred picture shows and music hall at the Bristol Hippodrome. So he went ...”

“... electorate from succumbing to the over-optimistic prospectus presented by the SNP. Surely, David Cameron reckoned, the same formula would work again a mere two years later in the UK-wide Brexit referendum. After all, there was also the reassuring story of the UK’s first Euro-referendum in 1975. Then, the prime minister, Harold Wilson, had gone ...”

“... Reich while Nazi rule rested on an element of consent from business, civil service and army. That held true even under the radicalising impact of war. The account here of an army that resisted the Commissar Order (to murder political commissars captured on the Eastern Front) and was not directly implicated in the work of murder squads of the Einsatzgruppen is ...”

“... years after finishing The Civilising Process, Elias’s professional life was fitful. He held a research fellowship at the LSE, moved to Cambridge with the rest of its staff during the war, and was later briefly interned as an alien on the Isle of Man (C.P. Snow helped to get him released). After the war he taught extra-mural classes in London, then ...”

“... One of these fragile mirrors, that ever doted on thine image, is about to be broken.’ Godwin held back the publication of Matilda, thinking its mixture of fact and fiction likely to be mischievous, but Shelley in the next year borrowed an idealised version of the same plot for ‘Epipsychidion’, the poem Mary Shelley would describe as his ‘Italian ...”

“... meals. Only at the actual burial did the successor reveal himself, and even then, he was not held to possess his full powers until crowned and anointed with holy oil at Reims Cathedral. In the 17th century, however, the Bourbon monarch abandoned these quasi-magical rites. Instead, they retreated into their royal palaces, where they developed the ...”

“... This is the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, and although its general principles are held true by all but a few mavericks, the notion of a truly point-like moment of creation – a singularity, in the lingo – has seemed unattractive to quite a few physicists, and there have been numerous attempts to construct cosmological models which conform ...”

“... It lost on all counts (this was the year of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor), as if held back by its own modesty. But go back to the film and you will find the astonishing Blitz sequence, which reproduces Boorman’s own boyhood wonder at the lightshow spectacular of the bombing raids – no matter the damage they did. In that rapturous ...”

“... all helped to bring Hitler to power in 1933. So did his own shrewdness as an organisation man who held the movement together in the lean years, then fended off the putschist hotheads. But the Hitler familiar from the newsreels, the demagogue, was decisively important. An embodiment of his Party’s dynamic appeal who came to be widely seen as a saviour, he ...”

“... we know what happens when politics falls apart, including Europe in the 1930s, which is often held up as a warning for what might be around the corner. Contemporary America is far more prosperous than other states where democracy has failed in the past, however unequally that prosperity is distributed. Its population is much older. Civil disorder tends to ...”

“... and its allies gained only 140 seats, despite topping the first-round poll. The rump centre right held on to its fifty seats. The ‘clarification’ called for by the president has instead produced unprecedented confusion, with no discernible majority or significant plurality.In the short run, the only certainty is instability. Any minority, coalition or ...”

“... for the CIA both in Latin America and in Africa. Luis Posada is an explosives expert who formerly held a commission in the US Army. Like Rodriguez, he participated in many anti-Castro operations in the Sixties. In the early Seventies, he served as a counter-insurgency adviser to the Venezuelan Army, and, later, as chief of operations of the Venezuelan ...”