“... talks the trumpeter Al Hirt into allowing him to attend his concert, or when the lovestruck young man persuades a janitor to allow him and Hillary into a museum that had closed for the day. But there is also and much more often a genuine love of interpersonal exchange for its own sake (brilliantly caught in John Travolta’s portrayal of the Clinton ...”

“... is the subject of about a fifth of that total, from the copies and life studies he made as a young man in the 1850s through the early history paintings to the naturalistic studies of the 1870s and 1880s and beyond. This encyclopedic survey of womanhood has recently attracted a great deal of attention, much of it stimulated by the massive 1988 exhibition ...”

“... and his brother Konrad were educated at a progressive boarding school and joined the Communist Young Pioneers. When Hitler came to power the family fled, after brief stops in Switzerland and France, to the Great Soviet Union the boys had heard so much about. Markus remained there for 11 years, becoming ‘Misha’ and acquiring fluent Russian during a ...”

“... sport and considered the gap between the IOC’s claims and the reality of its actions. David Miller’s Igniting the Games is not that book. As its subtitle suggests, it is primarily a celebration of Bach’s heroic attempts to surmount the crisis. Miller has past form for leaving out uncomfortable facts. His official history of the IOC describes ...”

“... which has recently been brilliantly treated in a collection of essays edited by Jenny Doctor, David Wright and Nicholas Kenyon.* In terms (for instance) of its performing space, the crucial dates were 1893 and 1941 (when the Queen’s Hall was destroyed and the concerts moved to the Albert Hall); in terms of sponsorship and organisation, the key years ...”

“... and poisonous everywhere from the farmstead to the gleaming suburb. And, bitterest of ironies, young men must die in defence of all this. Several stories deal with the war against South Africa’s neighbours. The young paratrooper in Etienne Van Heerden’s ‘My Cuban’ broods: ‘Oh how we float, the flower of the ...”

“... the Tories’ fate? Or was it the announcement soon afterwards by the once rational Sir George Young, Secretary of State for Transport, that the answer to the mounting horrors of the London Underground is to flog it off to the likes of Stagecoach plc? Sir George timed his announcement to fit in sweetly with the news that Stagecoach, having just won the ...”

“... The young Wordsworth, standing on Westminster Bridge, felt the wonder of the city. He did not try to comprehend it as a scientific phenomenon, for it was not his job to provide a systematic explanation of the integrated operation of its ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples. And yet there is a sense of marvel that such an organism, with its mighty heart, could come into being and function in its baffling complexity, heaving with activity as so many people went about their separate occasions by day, and lying in a deep calm by night ...”

“... own art.In the second volume of William Feaver’s biography of Lucian Freud (Bloomsbury, £35), David Dawson, Lucian’s long-serving assistant, describes Susanna Chancellor, the woman who remained Lucian’s partner longer than anyone else, as ‘a proper woman, not one of these neurotics’. She is the girlfriend who replaced me.People don’t become ...”

“... of female society), those who play professional football do not: they are still overwhelmingly young workingclass men. Which brings us to Arsenal. To the extent that any individual club historically stands for this culture (for better and worse) it is Arsenal: no other club has had such continuous membership of whatever has been at the time the senior ...”

“... Dolly Varden, in Barnaby Rudge, a locksmith’s daughter and the most overtly sexual of his young heroines, is ogled as relentlessly by the novel’s narrator as she is by a squad of suitors of her own age and class whom we are clearly meant to regard as altogether less eligible than him. During the ‘No Popery!’ riots of June 1780, two of the ...”

“... David Mitchell’s new novel is set on and around an artificial island called Dejima, constructed in the bay of Nagasaki to house representatives of the Vereenigde Oest-Indische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company), the sole official conduit for European trade with Japan during almost all of the rule of the Tokugawa Shoguns (1603-1867 ...”

“... shown alongside his prints are mostly posthumous catalogues. Around the end of 1980, Hujar met a young artist, David Wojnarowicz; they were briefly lovers and continued to collaborate on various projects. Hujar photographed Wojnarowicz’s mural paintings at New York’s disused piers, where gay men had found erotic ...”

“... David Reubeni​ posed a puzzle to contemporaries; he still poses one today. The Mediterranean world was turbulent in the early decades of the 16th century. The Ottoman Empire toppled the Mamluks in 1517, giving the sultan control over Egypt, Syria and much of the Arabian Peninsula; Western Christian rulers feared that they might be next ...”

“... fail to maintain her pretence of leadership. Neil Kinnock may, despite himself, take over. David Owen may come out of his increasingly conservative camouflage to capture that middle ground on which success in British politics has been said, with decreasing plausibility, to rest. None, however, has a politically able team behind them. Almost anything ...”