“... she has been drawn to the recently published memoirs of the Essex clergyman, the Rev. Andrew Clark, and quotes extensively from that admirable record (Echoes of the Great War). One chapter deals with the unhappy French countryside, which for four years was methodically (and, from the South Coast, audibly) reduced to mush. Sir William Orpen, visiting the ...”

“... and his overmastering desire to avoid a repetition. Some years ago, I was interviewing Alan Clark MP about his book The Donkeys, a rugged study of British Great War generalship which became the script for Joan Littlewood’s Oh What A Lovely War. He suddenly said to me: ‘I daresay you’ve been told I’m a Fascist.’ I admitted that I had heard ...”

“... one – between war and luxury is a 17th-century trope, haunting the critique of absolutism. Saint-Simon at Versailles, praising the Dauphin at Louis’s expense, says: ‘The great and sublime maxim that kings are made for peoples and not peoples for kings, was so deeply imprinted on [the prince’s] soul that it made luxury and war odious to ...”

“... have so many of Britain’s great cities fared so badly in the 20th century?’ Peter Clark, the general editor of the series, asks in his preface. Turn the page, and Martin Daunton’s introduction descends with unconcealed relish into the ‘decay, corruption, stench and stickiness’ of the early Victorian city – a hell from which the best ...”

“... dismissed magic as fraud and delusion. From the early Christian church came the bogus levitator Simon Magus, a cautionary tale that endured for hundreds of years. His name links him to the priesthood of ancient Persia (and the wise men at the Nativity) but in the High Renaissance ‘magus’ came to mean a worker of occult marvels, using powers that in ...”

“... as static as a Monet locomotive idling at the Gare St Lazare. He also left out the hare. Kenneth Clark described Rain, Steam and Speed as the ‘most extraordinary’ of Turner’s paintings. ‘I suppose that everybody today would accept it as one of the cardinal pictures of the 19th century on account of its subject as well as its treatment.’ That ...”

“... Jay McInerney’s breakthrough novel, Bright Lights, Big City, and Morgan Entrekin, the editor at Simon and Schuster who acquired Bret Easton Ellis’s Less than Zero. Lish had the cult cred, but their properties shone the brightest. Gary and Morgan, Morgan and Gary, Jay and Bret, Bret and Jay – how often we heard their names tick-tock together then, the ...”

“... waged against William Rogers, Nixon’s Secretary of State, is now being waged by William Clark, Reagan’s special assistant for National Security Affairs, against George Shultz, the present Secretary of State. Hersh seems to me to have got it exactly the wrong way round when he writes: ‘ever the apt pupil, Haig had learned well how to manipulate ...”

“... in 1998 with the stated aim of offering bespoke firearms training to government agencies. Al Clark, an early mentor of Prince’s in the navy who collaborated with him in establishing the centre, told Scahill that the concept had, in fact, been his, and added: ‘One of the things that started happening was Erik wanted it to be a playground for his rich ...”

“... Nicholas Scott has consoled himself since his departure from office with a consultancy with Clark and Smith Industries, whose products include many aimed at the disabled, for whom Scott was the responsible minister when in office. John McGregor (afterwards Lord McGregor) has rejoined merchant bankers Hill Samuel since his departure from the Transport ...”

“... Forest’ that form the basis for this, her much anticipated last book, in Cambridge in 2003. The Clark Lectures were themselves the product of an extended reflection on the significance of Shakespeare’s imaginary woodlands, developing and expanding material from earlier lectures and essays. As Peter Holland’s eloquent afterword reminds us, Barton’s ...”

“... of lesser mortals. The whole story, with its air of tragedy repeated as farce, is told by Tom Clark in The Great Naropa Poetry Wars.† When Butler turns from his opening chapter on ‘History’ to his longer sections of ‘Exposition’ and ‘Polemic’, his argument grows stronger. He defines two aesthetic conventions as basic to the art of the ...”