“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... destiny of music in our century is with the mad camp of Europeras I-V, those theatrical cut-ups of grand opera on which he was working until last year. The Cage project turns out to be unworthy in so many ways, footling, offensive, a bad, interminable joke; and sympathetic commentators may be reminded of those who dutifully spoke for the defence at the Lady ...”

“... David Wallace​ ’s Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 contains 82 chapters by an enormous team of international contributors spanning what Wallace describes as nine ‘itineraries’: Paris to Béarn; Calais to London; St Andrews to Finistère; Basel to Danzig; Avignon to Naples; Palermo to Tunis; Cairo to Constantinople; Mount Athos to Muscovy; Venice to Prague ...”

“... such as de Pujol, who took them on as students in their ateliers.Female pupils of Jacques-Louis David exhibited work at every Salon between 1791 and 1837: in a letter of 1787, defending the morality of his mixed Louvre atelier to the arts administration, David claimed that his women students, all ‘irreproachable’ in ...”

“... hold of Eluard ... Eluard rolls with a heap of other bodies down the monumental staircase of the Grand Circle’). He reads Russian, French, German, English, American, Spanish and Japanese books – fiction, philosophy, politics, poetry, history, anthropology ... He sketches his uncle, the writer General Butovsky, in a pair of spliced punchlines. In daily ...”

“... word. We look forward with anticipation to the next instalment. With The War between the Generals David Irving has turned away from the German side of the last war, where he is almost uniquely at home, to bring his methods to bear on the making of Allied strategy. The period he has chosen is that which runs from the American entry to the achievement of ...”

“... post 13 years earlier. He died, aged 82, only six months after I glimpsed him. On the cover of David Ellis’s Memoirs of a Leavisite he is photographed standing with a tree and a bench behind him in (according to the jacket info) the very garden into which he escaped that autumn afternoon. He is wearing the same literary-critical uniform too: the baggy ...”

“... its inhabitants have frequently been massacred. Round about 1000 BC, the city was captured by King David. Assuming that he existed – and there is no archaeological or other evidence for him, or for Solomon, Moses or Joshua, outside the Bible, the relevant books of which were written hundreds of years after the events they purport to describe – ...”

“... and Ethel Rosenberg for conspiring to give atomic secrets to the Russians. Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, a machinist at Los Alamos, had been arrested first, and told investigators that Julius had recruited him to steal information on the Manhattan Project. Intercepted Soviet cables appeared to confirm that Julius – codenamed ‘Liberal’ – had ...”

“... ship 325 million dollars’ worth of oil (at present prices) to Franco. He became a Knight of the Grand Cross of Isabela la Católica and an enthusiast for Nazi Germany. A pal of Hermann Goering’s, he traded busily with the Third Reich until Hitler declared war on the US in 1941. ‘Rieber died in 1968, at the age of 86, a wealthy man.’ Hochschild’s ...”

“... I am greedy for as big a share of it as I can get.’ Moreover, his studies were conceived on the grand scale, discerning cyclical patterns of decline and fall which offered suggestive analogies (‘though I don’t believe that history repeats itself in any accurate or scientific sense’) between ancient civilisations and modern developments. By 1912, when ...”