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“... of militants, denouncing the corruption of the Saudi regime and its ties to the US, overran the Grand Mosque in Mecca, taking thousands hostage. One of the hostage-takers declared himself to be the true Mahdi who had come to redeem Islam. The Saudi authorities, deeply shaken by this direct challenge to their rule, stormed the mosque at the cost of hundreds ...”

“... a bus station with its satellite café. When the bus station was demolished, the café failed. David Mills, the Owl Man of Albion Drive, fenced the site, built hutches for his birds and excavated a carp pool. For years, nobody cared. He had, like so many others in this borough, slipped into a crack between worlds. If the council acknowledged his existence ...”

“... when it came to Gillray’s turn he made them all kneel reverentially and drink to Jacques-Louis David, a notorious republican, as the “first painter and patriot in Europe”.’ The anecdote is second-hand but entirely credible, and the question only occurs later: could he have meant it? No one was sure at the time. Draper Hill surmised that the meeting ...”

“... offence – the breach of United Nations resolutions – was also relatively trivial in the grand scheme of things (trivial in the sense that it happens all the time). The Abyssinian solution would have been to find Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, destroy them and those responsible for them, and then leave, in order to prove it really was about ...”

“... lies discreetly behind a non-academic joyfulness. The French used to celebrate Richard Cobb as le grand Cobb; and perhaps it isn’t too early to hail his successor as le grand Robb. Of Robb’s 19 chapters, three are set in the late 18th century, six in the 19th, eight in the 20th and two in the 21st. They feature many of ...”

“... to use the arts effectively to create a special sense of kingship’. There was to be a grand firework display in Green Park, accompanied by Handel’s specially commissioned Music for the Royal Fireworks. Lacking the expertise to stage the spectacle, courtiers turned to Tyers, who lent his advice and staff on one condition: that he be allowed to ...”

“... way members of the higher bohemia, were having lunch in a London restaurant. Agnes Magruder was a grand Bostonian, ‘a character from a Henry James novel’ according to her daughter. She was known as ‘Magouche’, the name given her by the painter Arshile Gorky, with whom she had a turbulent marriage until his suicide in 1948. Joan Leigh Fermor, a former ...”

“... old colonial foes, and the circle around Empress Farah Pahlavi believed that Tehran should have a grand national museum on the scale of the British Museum or the Louvre. In her account of the museum’s formation, Iran Modern (2018), Pahlavi writes that the idea occurred to her in the late 1960s, when a young woman painter complained there was nowhere in ...”

“... Paul Coltman, Richard Dankleff, Robin Ivy, Pete Morgan (two), Phyllis Koestenbaum, Barbara Moore, David MacSweeney (one out of two), Randall Garrison, Donald Stallybrass, Ellery Akers, Peter Abbs, John Hodgen, Andrew Motion, Edwin Drummond, Gregory Harrison, Gordon Mason and Robert Ballard, Isabel Nathaniel and Peter Didsbury, Anthony Edkins and Brian ...”

“... so-called satirists of That Was the Week That Was, a fashionable programme that made a hero out of David Frost. Deedes was at a loss to blunt so vigorous and novel an attack. He was also present at the midnight meeting called to question ‘Jolly Jack’ Profumo about his private life. Profumo lied like a trooper. Martin Redmayne, who was without doubt the ...”

“... colour and sharp light, so that the whole thing looks mildly cartoon-like, often resembling, as David Denby says, hyperrealist painting. Or the way we imagined the 1960s when we thought they were still the 1950s. Larry Gopnik, played by Michael Stuhlbarg with a fine capacity for recurring surprise, as if he were Clark Kent who kept forgetting he had another ...”

“... self-important, fussy, but sensitive to beauty, romance and alien cultures – who is uppermost in David Gilmour’s splendid new biography. Gilmour punctures the myth of the insufferably arrogant and despotically ‘un-English’ Curzon perpetuated by society gossip and by the hostile accounts of the Beaverbrook circle. Attendants at his Indian court did not ...”

“... as with MGM in 1948, the benefactor’s motives are transparent. As transparent is the Smarties Grand Prix, which Jill Paton Walsh won for her children’s book, Gaffer Samson’s Lunch, in 1984: Nestlé’s want to associate a product which is bad for children’s teeth with one that is thought to be good for their minds. The Encore fiction award, which ...”

“... the eye of the viewer at a stroke, as a single mammoth bulk, and every detail is sacrificed to one grand and, undeniably, Greek gesture. Whatever happened in 1856 to produce this change the result was a total and permanent renunciation of all arched styles. From this point Thomson pledged his life to trabeation: the strict rule of post and lintel construction ...”

“... Did it hold the political whiphand? In the second volume of his trilogy on the City since 1815, David Kynaston repeatedly shows his familiarity with the controversies. But his technique is to deal fair-mindedly and unexceptionably with them, more or less in passing; the book makes no claim to be an incisive or provocative analysis of the City’s role in ...”