“... at least, was the theory. When, a decade ago, Conservative politicians and ‘gurus’ such as Michael Gove and Steve Hilton heralded the ‘post-bureaucratic age’, what they were claiming (in common with the Silicon Valley techno-utopians who inspired them) was that the institutions and academic disciplines of the age of mass democracy had become ...”

“... Which is just what happened, so we’ve always been told, to the French at Crécy.In his new book, Michael Livingston argues that we have got nearly everything about Crécy wrong. The standard story has been told many times by historians and by novelists, including by Bernard Cornwell twenty years ago in Harlequin. (Cornwell has written a generous foreword to ...”

“... like a demonic snowflake, made by King from black painted wood. Soviet artefacts: a silk banner, a crimson alarm clock, hammer-and-sickle badges. A fleet of scarlet filing cabinets holding photographs, documents and journals. And modern objects which nodded to the Reds: a scarlet drawing board, a scarlet rubbish bin, a scarlet Sellotape dispenser. In ...”

“... the densities of the Human Clay, these antinomies and others besides, he brings together under the banner of his Jewishness: Diasporist Art. The personages in his paintings are always representative, mythic, however local their context, however strong their resemblance to people or pictures known. He has cited Daumier’s Ratapoil as an exemplar for the ...”

“... within the rich cultures and subcultures of agitation in and out of doors. In the light of this, Michael Duffy, as general editor of this series, has rightly decided that a substantial explanatory introduction was needed for each volume and he has assembled a first-rate team of historians to address such problems. Several have interpreted their brief as ...”

“... was thirteen, she heard a voice from God, which she eventually identified as that of the archangel Michael. The voice told her that ‘her mission was to lead the dauphin to Reims to be crowned,’ according to royal tradition. Before that, it was her duty to break the English siege of Orléans. By the time she gained access to the dauphin he must have been ...”

“... krasny, also meaning ‘red’. The Red Army was the Fine Army and the Army of the Red Banner, symbolising blood sacrifice, embarked on a metaphysical struggle widi the forces of evil. It was typical of the Soviet attitude to intellectual activity to use science to achieve the unscientific end of turning an ordinary human corpse into an object of ...”

“... Almost three decades of violence followed, with the loss of more than 3500 lives. Operation Banner, the longest continuous deployment by the British army, did not secure peace any more than its counterinsurgency campaigns before and since. Far from it. Intelligence played a part, as Thomas Leahy convincingly sets out, but a far from decisive one. The ...”

“... homily, a quasi-secular point in the mass. But it didn’t work out that way. A protester called Michael Petrelis stood up on a pew and started shouting. Another activist, Tom Keane, received the host, then impulsively crushed it and dropped it on the floor. Schulman was in the cathedral that day, although she doesn’t use her experience as a lens through ...”

“... impose conscription on Ireland, led to a radicalisation of Nationalist opinion. Rallying under the banner of the Sinn Féin party – founded earlier in the century by the non-violent Nationalist Arthur Griffith but from 1917 led by the senior survivor of 1916, Eamon de Valera – this new radical movement won 73 of the 105 Irish seats at Westminster in the ...”

“... policy, rural or urban in outlook, and so on. What, in particular, does its ‘democratic’ banner mean? Bruce records without explanation the dropping of ‘Protestant’ from the party’s title; he admits that Calvinism sits uneasily with liberal democracy; but his analogy with Leninist ‘democratic centralism’ does not seem entirely apt. There ...”

“... to meritocratic independence – indeed, it was often alleged, to outright republicanism. As Michael Franklin suggests in his excellent biography, Jones must have relished upending the patron-client hierarchy when he got Althorp elected to Samuel Johnson’s Turk’s Head Club, where Jones had mingled with Burke and Gibbon before even Boswell was ...”

“... company, were not happy about this turn of events. In 1949 Life had showcased Pollock under the banner: ‘Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?’ In 1964 the same magazine profiled Lichtenstein under the heading: ‘Is He the Worst Artist in the US?’The charge of banality was first to do with content. To the delight of some, to the ...”

“... which runs the event, won’t let the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organisation march under its own banner. Hillary Clinton, who’s running for Pat Moynihan’s old seat, marched this year in an alternative parade in Queens as well as in the official version. Politicians often try too hard to get the Irish vote. In No News at Throat Lake,* his account of a ...”

“... Clancy fired the agent who had represented him for 15 years and hired a ‘business manager’, Michael Ovitz, who, he hoped, would market his technothrillers more lucratively in Hollywood. Most of what has happened to the book business since 1960 is, according to Epstein, retrograde. ‘Trade publishing’, by which he means the careful making of good ...”