“... by the Moreel triptych and some thirty more works, was classed along with Van Eyck and Gerard David as the great Flemish primitive. On that occasion his particular Flemish religiosity (again with the less-than-convincing comparison to Fra Angelico) was emphasised. On the one hand, the very model of a Flemish primitive master; on the other, the German ...”

“... the Party, the crisis within ruling circles in the Eighties, perestroika. On all these subjects, David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb is the more acute and penetrating guide. Kapuściński spends no time in dissidents’ apartments, or at the crowded press conferences in Moscow’s international press centre; high politics bores him. He has slipped away from the ...”

“... contemporaries. But they were not left to be admired – except in details like the rock the David stands on, where rusticity was appropriate. Rodin’s way of leaving figures half in and half out of the block, and letting the lines show where piece-moulds joined on bronzes, was evidence of his tenderness for the unfinished state – but these things can ...”

“... Bagehot remarked of the House of Lords that anyone who had a high opinion of its contribution to the governance of Britain should go and have a look at it. He clearly believed that the mere sight of the so-called Upper House at work would cure any tendency towards excessive reverence. He had sound reasons for this judgment, since the outstanding feature of the Victorian House of Lords was, in a word, absenteeism ...”

“... are translated as follows: ‘and they put to death the Leader of the Community, the Bran[ch of David ...] / and with woundings, and the (high) priest will command.’ The verb rendered as ‘woundings’ might be cognate with the verb meaning ‘to pierce’ that occurs in the Suffering Servant passage of Deutero-Isaiah, and Eisenman and Wise are happy to ...”

“... business. The most sensational book on this score was Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy (1971) by David Bergamini, who saw the Emperor as the mastermind of Japanese militarism. The book was so riddled with factual errors that it was easy to discredit. Even so, Bergamini was a much used source for Edward Behr’s popular book Hirohito: Behind the Myth ...”

“... explain and go to check the newspapers. The Independent has a well-informed and balanced piece by David McKittrick on the genesis of the ceasefire. He seems cautiously optimistic. Not so that other old ham, Conor Cruise O’Brien, writing on the same newspaper’s opinion pages. O’Brien sees the timing of the ceasefire as evidence of a Machiavellian plot to ...”

“... were painted by Abraham Bosschaert, an Antwerp painter displaced to the Hague: landscapes by David Vinckboons from Mechelen and Antwerp; and architectural fictions by Paulus Vredeman de Vries, another refugee from Antwerp who eventually settled in Amsterdam by way of Danzig and Prague. It is persuasively suggested that the marked specialisation ...”

“... with about as much in common as Michael Howard and Dennis Skinner. One of them is described by David Solkin in his Painting for Money, reviewed in these pages last year by Ronald Paulson. Solkin’s Hogarth is an ambitious social climber, determined to efface the memory of his beginnings as an apprentice in the trade of silver-engraving, and to become a ...”

“... who, initially at least, brought to it the same benevolent rule as editor-proprietor that David Astor exercised on the Observer. It was at this stage that Inglis was lucky enough to join it – having leapt on board from the Daily Sketch, where the tone was a good deal more robust, or thuggish. If still a conservative paper, the Spectator was even by ...”

“... us, by his defeat at the Socratic Club.It is difficult to know what to make of Lewis, whom Lord David Cecil declared to be ‘a great man’, yet who seems to have had only a minimal self-knowledge and who had a capacity for getting things ‘plumb wrong’ in human relationships. It was certainly a man of unusual talent who produced some sixty ...”

“... rather like reports from less-than-overwhelmed referees. Asa Briggs is dismissed in a few lines; David Landes is damned with the faint praise of ‘considerable literary skills and a certain old-fashioned rhetoric’; and Lord Dacre is rapped on the knuckles for failing to write a big book on the Enlightenment. Such comments are more revealing of their ...”

“... be a widow in the next.’ It is a warning that has too often been ignored – and not only by the David Jenkinses and the Spacely-Trellises of today’s Ecclesia Anglicana. For they, too, of course, had their predecessors. The Bishop of London who declared at the outbreak of war in 1914, ‘This is the greatest fight ever made for the Christian Religion – a ...”

“... for the family firm, fundamentally different characters. The wonder, however, is not that ‘David’ should have turned out badly but that ‘Bertie’ should have turned out so well. (There were two more brothers, ‘Harry’ of Gloucester and George of Kent, whose capacity for kingship, had the succession moved further down the line, was for different ...”

“... If it’s December 1941 in Casablanca,’ Humphrey Bogart moodily asks in a famous movie, ‘what time is it in New York?’ The answer is not as obvious as it looks. Time, especially political time, has snags, hitches, runs; lags behind in some places, suddenly catches up. Reading translations, which have often travelled to us across all kinds of odd delays, we could do worse than adapt Bogart’s question to our texts ...”