“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 – ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... vulnerable to attacks from religious quarters, as was shown in the armed occupation of Mecca’s Grand Mosque in 1979 by an eclectic group of extremists led by Juhaiman al Utaibi. A child of the Ikhwan who grew up in the shadow of its defeat, Juhaiman and his two hundred followers (who included Yemenis, Sudanese, Kuwaitis, Iraqis and Egyptians as well as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... one point in the early stages of the 1996 campaign, Branch asks him ‘whether he focused on the grand strategies or the daily polls and individual states. “All of those,” he replied. “I think about all of those.”’ His appetite for information is insatiable, whatever the subject. When he talks to Branch about technical problems at the Hubble ...”

“... In the Thirties and early Forties the English poet David Gascoyne was much enamoured of the Continental, Late Romantic image of writing and of the writer as a visionary misfit. By the end of the Thirties, his place in the great Euro-Visionary Song Contest was almost secured. He confessed his ambition in his Journals in 1938: Want to write an essay on ‘The Apotheosis of Lautréamont ...”

“... the vapid tax-and-spend policies they had drifted into. Their new spokesmen – Vincent Cable, David Laws and Mark Oaten – are the first prominent Liberals since Jo Grimond who could seriously claim to be heirs of the Grand Old Man. Political commentators point out that parties make such shifts because otherwise they ...”