“... and humans, André Leroi-Gourhan on the role of technology in evolution – are reluctant to draw grand conclusions about deep history. Perhaps their appeal lies simply in the fact that they provide no easy affirmations about human nature and progress, and no utopian solutions to contemporary problems. Rejecting Jung’s theory of an unmoored collective ...”

“... and reproductive capabilities of the communities that remained behind. Africa was transformed. David Livingstone is prominent among the figures credited with ending the slave trade. In fact, pressure for its abolition was already widespread and achieving results before he was born (in 1813) and it had been banned by the governments of the United States and ...”

“... Like most biographies nowadays, David Nokes’s John Gay is very long, but unlike some of the others it is not much longer than it needed to be. Gay devoted so much of his attention to people grander than himself that his life story can’t be told without allusion to those of more complicated and ambitious figures like Pope, Swift and Addison ...”

“... happening, right now, in real time, with real consequences. But if they’re on a hundred grand a week, just how real are those consequences? Answer: not very. These kids know that for them, the normal rules don’t apply. They can do what they like, and nothing really matters. If nothing really matters, why are we watching? A spectacular example of ...”

“... reaction in Germany to the Princess Caroline decision – that the case would be taken to the Grand Chamber – subsided as it dawned on politicians that Strasbourg had done them something of a favour. Observers with a sense of history have noted that the tabloids’ self-justification, advanced in the name of press freedom, mirrors that of the ...”

“... at bay has invaded his home. Lucas goes berserk, and smashes the offender’s head inside the grand piano. In fact, almost none of the men in his family, brothers and cousins brought from North Carolina, can keep their fingers out of the pies they are supposed to be selling, and they are Lucas’s downfall. His ideal is not austerity but abstinence from ...”

“... In assembling  Le Dieu caché: les peintres du Grand Siècle et la vision de Dieu, a collection of 63 French 17th-century religious pictures which can be seen at the Villa Medici in Rome until 28 January, Olivier Bonfait and Neil MacGregor challenge us to take theology as seriously as aesthetics. They also prove that it requires more than a sensitive eye and a generous imagination to understand a picture ...”

“... with a chairman who accused me of being a disciple of Sorel, a writer of whom I had barely heard. (David Caute sardonically notes that ‘the allusion to Sorel was standard nonsense among professors of history and politics hostile to the New Left: one may search in vain for any favourable reference to Sorel in New Left ideology.’) I had also been National ...”

“... in the popular iconography of American freedom, alongside comic-book heroes in capes and tights. David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, a federalist president who failed to secure re-election, has sold two million copies since it was published in 2001. For all its sentimental and antiquarian dimensions, the cult of the founders has damaging political ...”

“... her reservations: ‘never was a court more manacled by the observances of etiquette.’ On less grand occasions they met the painter David, an Englishman who had befriended Charlotte Corday at her trial, and Charles James Fox – ‘rather lourd and maladroit’. With the help of a young American, Margaret and Katherine ...”

“... myths in The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, which jettisoned a grand narrative of statesmanship and party principle, and put in its place the microscopic study of individual politicians, their interests, networks and connections. Clearly, from around 1930 the Whig mythology that had for centuries shaped the narratives of ...”

“... to make London and New York laugh and whistle.’ Queen Victoria told Sullivan he should write a grand opera. Dismay intensified when he obeyed and made everyone yawn with Ivanhoe. Then Elgar arrived and Britain recognised what it had been waiting for. Sullivan’s shortcomings no longer mattered, and the nation ditched his serious music, retaining only ...”

“... to do both, though some of his most enthusiastic champions outside Hungary have seized on the grand themes of his work while paying little attention to the sly comedy that subverts any pretensions to grandeur. W.G. Sebald called The Melancholy of Resistance ‘a book about a world into which the Leviathan has returned’, and Susan Sontag saw it as ...”

“... escaped from a prison camp and joined a band of Italian partisans during the Second World War. David Storm Rice, an expert on Islamic metalwork, had an affair with Clara Malraux, fought as a commando in Ethiopia and, after a distinguished career as an art historian, suffered a nervous breakdown and committed suicide. Robin Zaehner carried out dangerous ...”

“... Why should​ poets’ deaths carry more weight than those of others? David Markson’s litany of deaths, This Is Not a Novel, starts off with a poet’s death (Byron’s) and expands to commemorate, in laconic sentences and judicious fragments, the deaths (sprinkled with quotes and quirks) of novelists, painters, composers, philosophers ...”