“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Do we not always hate the persecuted?’ Barbera and McBrien assert that hers was ‘the usual pre-war attitude of the English’: but it wasn’t the attitude of many of her friends, some of whom broke with her because of her statements. Taken together, Stevie Smith’s novels could be seen as a continuous discussion about the state of middle-...”

“... inferior though he knew he was superior, was an inadvertent and inverse link with the lower-middle-class whites who fled Queens and Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s for the Long Island suburbs to escape black migration. They went one way and Trump another, but both were repelled by Manhattan’s racial liberalism, which was seen as an insult to and impingement ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”