“... 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 ...”

“... of old, ten centuries back, to the Mogadishu of Siyad Barre, or to the Mogadishu of the civil war. If Mogadishu occupies an ambiguous space in our minds and hearts, it is because ours is a land with an overwhelming majority of pastoralists, who are possessed of a deep urbophobia. Maybe this is why most Somalis do not seem unduly perturbed by the fate of ...”

“... meant to be. Indeed, there are some surprising omissions, of which perhaps the most remarkable is war. The other horsemen of the apocalypse are present in force – famine, pestilence and inflation are dealt with at length – but there is no sustained discussion of the deleterious economic and social consequences of Europe’s wars. It must be remembered ...”

“... Germans, displaced from the Soviet Union and living in Germany during and after the Second World War before being resettled in the United States. In her mother’s opinion, she had an ‘oversensitive’ nose. Her Russian and German memories as a small child focused on the filthy smells of outhouses and basement shelters. Nobody washed themselves and their ...”

“... prices,’ but claims that ‘privatisation had to be done quickly … in order to create a class of property owners.’ Boris Berezovsky, one of the most brazen of the financiers, described this achievement as ‘the rule of the seven bankers’ (semibankirshchina). This is a grimly amusing play on the notorious ‘rule of the seven ...”

“... boxes. In the US in particular, climate change has become a central weapon in a culture war between left and right. ‘Attitudes on climate change … have become a social cue like gun control: a shorthand for figuring out who is in our group and cares about us,’ Marshall writes. Dan Kahan, a professor of psychology at Yale Law School, told him ...”

“... their peevish tussles with every local parliament they had to deal with, their itch to wage war on all fronts, and their readiness to move on to more promising pastures when the game was up.All dynasties have sought to gain territory by negotiating advantageous marriages, but none was pushier than the Habsburgs. The match between Philip and Mary was ...”

“... demonstrator, opposed to the métèques, to the immigrants who for good or ill had in those inter-war years become part of France. Nothing as yet that might foreshadow the future leader of the nation’s Left. Nothing, unless it was an unyielding drive for social advancement, decked out in the Florentine graces of a Machiavellianism that aimed higher than the ...”

“... liberals, New Dealers and American Stalinists – has been so neglected is thanks not just to Cold War Anti-Communism and the postwar economic boom, but to the triumph of the Trotskyist Partisan Review Modernists, now known as the ‘New York intellectuals’. (In his New Conservative baedeker, The Rise of a Counter-Establishment, the ...”

“... of Lords, and the disproportionately heavy losses suffered by the landed élite in the First World War. The result was that most landowners stopped building houses or buying land; there were massive sales of acres and mansions immediately before and after the First World War; and in the 1930s the actual demolition of country ...”

“... hands one a copy of Esquire for April featuring ‘The Hitler Formula: Out of the Ashes of World War Two and onto the Best-Seller List in 14 Easy Steps’, which in a two-page spread sums up the rules of the genre. Step One: arrange any six of the elements below in a six-inch-by-nine-inch space and red, black and white decor: Nazi flag, eagle, swastika, iron ...”

“... 1937, the events of that year have always seemed mysterious in a way that is not true of the Civil War, where the revolutionary regime fought for its existence, or even of Collectivisation, where the Soviet leadership waged terrible war on a section of the population that was deemed to stand in the way of its main political ...”

“... and outside the country, that his fall would precipitate widespread sectarian violence, even civil war. His success is chiefly due to a foreign policy, pioneered by his father, that allows the Baathist regime to portray itself as a linchpin of regional stability and security. Since coming to power after his father’s death in 2000, the younger Assad has ...”