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“... safe Labour constituency of South Leeds, his becoming personal assistant to Hugh Dalton during the war at the Ministry of Economic Warfare, his success as a civil servant in his own right, his election to Parliament in 1945, his rapid rise in the Attlee Governments to being, first, Minister of Fuel and Power, and then Chancellor of the Exchequer at the age of ...”

“... us that France is trying to forget the Revolution, to get over Napoleon and the long years of war, and to settle down under the restored Bourbon monarchy. We should note too that the film tells only one of the novel’s twinned stories: that of Lucien de Rubempré (Benjamin Voisin) in Paris and not that of his printer friend back at home. Perhaps Giannoli ...”

“... everyone fluently does what the clichés of the genre – the romance of disreputable upper-class life, a sort of Byronism for everyone – lead us to expect. What matters in the novel’s many stories is not social structure or the history of revolution and independence that is casually evoked but the recurring enigma of paternity and disguise. The ...”

“... a Boston Brahmin like the then Governor Bill Weld, a recognisable holdover from a Wasp ruling class that had given way to an Irish American bootlegging dynasty and affiliated ethnic pols like Michael Dukakis and Paul Tsongas. Romney lived in a mansion in Belmont, a town between Cambridge and Walden Pond with nothing but mansions; in the era of NWA I ...”

“... of incidents in the siege (they reappear in his later collection of etchings The Miseries of War) doesn’t spare the viewer any horror. It seems bitter stuff for the conquering party to use in celebration of a victory. (In Velázquez’s painting of the surrender of Breda – the background of which draws on Callot’s map – the opposing forces ...”

“... Gill, Gaudier-Brzeska, Elsie Henderson, Alan Durst. In works produced both before and after World War One, they began to remake the look and feel of the carving tradition. Dark hardwood and mottled native (i.e. English) stone were more often used than crystalline marble. The female torso stood for the human, its enforced abbreviation promising an unrealised ...”

“... This familiar tale was transformed, as for many artists, by a succession of disasters: the war on terror, the financial crisis, Trump’s presidency and the growth of the far right, the climate crisis, the Covid pandemic.The worse things become, however, the better Eisenman’s paintings get. Coping (2008) shows figures walking silently in a desolate ...”

“... This step was not as obvious or inevitable as it may now appear. Americans before the Second World War spoke less of the country’s exceptional primacy than of its exceptional aloofness from European-style power politics. They prided themselves on being above espionage, diplomatic intrigue and standing armies; they preferred to speak of international legal ...”

“... to the criminal excess of an idea on the march. Whether the idea is the triumph of the working class or of a master race, ideology leads to the graveyard. Although liberal-minded intellectuals have repeatedly mobilised some version of this argument against the isms of right and left, they have seldom mustered a comparable scepticism about that other idée ...”

“... how far Napoleon can still be taken – even in France – is less clear. Up to the First World War, the strength or weakness of Bonapartism was usually a potent indicator of how French men and women responded to their nation. Thus Napoleon’s improved reputation in the 1830s (his body was brought back in triumph from St Helena in 1840) pointed towards the ...”

“... trop tard pour l’histoire de la Révolution Française.’ He was, of course, wrong. The post-war generation, Cobb, Rudé, Soboul, Tönnesson, focusing upon popular movements, the Parisian working populace and the thugs who made a reality of the Terror in the provinces, found plenty to absorb their attention. In addition, a long tradition of studies of ...”

“... and its subtitle might have been spoken by the prophet Isaiah: ‘Peace to the Cottages! War on the Palaces!’ This slogan went straight into the German radical tradition and, from there, into folkmemory and cliché. I had always assumed that the words came straight from Büchner’s heart; Friede den Hütten! Krieg den Palästen! But when I read ...”

“... In the book, I argue that several contemporary phenomena – chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome, recovered memory, multiple personality disorder, satanic ritual abuse and alien abduction – are hysterical epidemics, real disorders but caused by psychological conflicts rather than viruses, nerve gas, devil worshippers or extra-terrestrials. The ...”

“... I made my first visit to Belfast when I was almost 11, late in 1939. The war had just started, and Italy had joined Germany in aggression. My father was the sergeant-in-charge of the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Warren point, Co. Down and he was instructed to arrest all enemy aliens in the town and convey them for internment to Crumlin Road Jail in Belfast ...”

“... strictly limited, there’s always artificial light to read by. I have never had to prepare for a class by candlelight. I have never had to look for matches by the light of the fire. I always have a torch placed where I can find it in the dark. I have absolutely no idea what it would be like to live without electricity or gas, without torch or match, in a ...”