“... photographer who became an icy director. Sometimes this psychology is bluntly moralised, as when John Baxter, another biographer (HarperCollins, 1997), says that Kubrick’s making Eyes Wide Shut, ‘a film about self-involved people and their fantasies’, has ‘a sour inevitability’. And sometimes it is aestheticised, as when LoBrutto calls Kubrick ‘a ...”

“... Amadeus.) Binyon’s biography has the populousness of Tolstoy. An astonishing number of major and minor characters are introduced – and thickly introduced, with a paragraph or two of data – and kept in patient sight over hundreds of pages. Even very minor figures, who appear only once, get a packed footnote. A French chef called Tardif, for ...”

“... paid it little attention. No monuments or tributes marked the event. On the contrary, major Jewish organisations opposed such a memorialisation.Fear of alienating Gentiles by emphasising the distinctiveness of Jewish experience was always a problem for American (as well as European) Jews, and during the Second World War had inhibited efforts to ...”

“... constituent pieces (well over a thousand of them) are now mounted separately. There are two other major miscellanies, both in England. One is the collection of drawings and manuscripts in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. This is also an inheritance from Pompeo Leoni: indeed, some of the smaller fragments at Windsor were demonstrably snipped by Leoni out ...”

“... that resulted from the influx of European goods; high interest rates on loans; ownership of major businesses by foreign capitalists’. The war, which enfeebled the economies of the major imperialist powers – Britain, Germany and France – and further discredited their regimes, endowed America with both power and ...”

“... was itself unprecedented. Its catastrophic results led to Trump’s election, and one of his major goals ‘was to return US trade policy to its realistic and pragmatic roots’. Historically, as we have seen, this is a justifiable claim. Lighthizer has every right to argue that ‘protecting American trade interests was one of the very reasons for our ...”

“... must be partly the help more recently given by such learned work on the art of inscriptions as John Sparrow’s, whose Visible Words, Line upon Line and Lapidaria are gratefully quoted in this and the following paragraph. For some three hundred years after the mid-15th century, a new art born in Italy swept Europe, accompanying the greater visual ...”

“... couple were illustrious knights of the royal chamber of Richard II, Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, ‘the Castor and Pollux of the Lollard movement’, as the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane called them. Neville died just four days after Clanvowe, the inscription records, in October 1391. The Westminster Chronicle fills in the ...”

“... Kevin Sharpe’s Personal Rule of Charles I, Conrad Russell’s Fall of the British Monarchies and John Morrill’s Nature of the English Revolution all represent distinct standpoints, but certain common features continue to stand out. Rejecting both constitutional explanations of the Caroline crisis, and class interpretations of the Civil War, these histories ...”

“... Art and New Wave. To see her in sunglasses was to see it was so. And in Roger Straus, the dapper major domo of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, she had a publisher who was closer to a studio boss in his roles as promoter, protector, enforcer and profane big daddy. Partisan Review was Sontag’s Book of Revelation. She revered the magazine from the first moment she ...”

“... other OPEC powers; the dismal findings of the Simmons Report, spelling out the declining yields of major Saudi oilfields – had placed in doubt the Saudi role as a reliable ‘swing producer’, which could turn the taps on or off whenever it was in America’s strategic interest. The US government has, in its ‘special relationship’ with the House of ...”

“... of Pliny’s speech in praise of Trajan (the Panegyric) and some commentary on the Gospel of St John. But the prize finds, making up the largest part of the book, were faintly legible copies of the correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto, one of the leading scholars and orators of the second century ad, and tutor to the future emperor Marcus Aurelius, who ...”

“... associations, was still finding it difficult to write. ‘Incapable of lecturing or of publishing major works, he sought a new role as independent adviser, stimulator and organiser,’ and made the mistake of accepting an invitation from the publisher Paul Siebeck to produce a new handbook of political economy. One by one, the 45 contributors deserted, and he ...”

“... scenes occur in the great mining films of the early 1940s (Carol Reed’s The Stars Look Down, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley). Bernard soon leaves the mineshafts behind. His main interest lies in the ways in which the advent of the elevator transformed the design, construction and experience of high-rise buildings, and thus of modern urban life in ...”

“... back to New York, where Hobie is waiting to fill the role of substitute father. After the only major temporal dissolve, we catch up with Theo eight years later. Having had an undistinguished college career, he’s taken over the sales-and-money side of Hobie’s business and made a success of it. But he’s addicted to pharmaceutical opiates, tortured by ...”