“... or did they favour the Tate because it had been founded at the initiative of another merchant prince, Sir Henry Tate? And why were the gestures of the Duveens so rarely imitated before the new Turner Wing of the Tate, the Clore Gallery, opened in 1987? Spalding is remarkably candid, if often crisp, in her survey of recent developments. These include the ...”

“... order to report to Major Thorold Dickinson (director of Gaslight in civilian life). Carol Reed and Peter Ustinov had been likewise commandeered, and the little group were told to produce a film to boost the British troops’ flagging morale. It was made, then aborted as subversive by the War Office; enough influential people had liked it, however, to ensure ...”

“... six weeks, his first completed play, The Silver Box. It was a notable success in the theatre, the Prince and Princess of Wales attending the final performance; and it was soon being staged in Germany and Russia. Within a year or two Galsworthy’s name was linked with those of Shaw and Granville-Barker and he was being regarded as a shining light of the ...”

“... historian departs from the actual world, he or she cannot wander like Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince unrestrained among infinite possibilities. As Hawthorn emphasises, counter-factuals that are too inclusive do not help test causal hypotheses. Not all worlds that are conceivable in what we might call hypo-space have equally privileged subjunctive ...”

“... noticeable that the ANC’s chief spokesmen on the mass action, Kasrils and the ANC Youth leader, Peter Mokoba, not only represent the movement’s most radical, adventurist wing but are both 2nd XI players. Indeed, if this was supposed to be the great trial of strength with the Government which the Hard Left has been thirsting for, it is difficult to see how ...”

“... into conflict with right-wingers inside and outside the Telegraph. To political columnist T.E. (Peter) Utley, an exponent of mid-19th century Conservatism, he was not a gentleman. (Hastings was greatly relieved when Utley left to write obituaries for the Times). Paul Johnson, once a rabid socialist and by now an equally rabid Tory, denounced him as ‘a ...”

“... if she didn’t seem to have been perfectly content with her existence. In his biography of Freud, Peter Gay quotes Martha’s reply to a letter of condolence after Freud’s death that it was ‘a feeble consolation that in the 53 years of our marriage there was not a single angry word between us, and that I always tried as much as possible to remove the ...”

“... muffled. Cretonne curtains are drawn, with a pretty pattern on them of the Queen and her fairytale Prince, riding to Westminster in a golden coach. Nanny lights the fire and sits herself down with a nice cup of tea and yesterday’s Daily Express, but she keeps half an eye on us too, as we bring out our trophies from abroad, the books and pictures we have ...”

“... story of the Enlightenment’s steady diffusion outwards from its Parisian source. In the 1960s, Peter Gay gave them new power in his brilliant extended essay The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Gay recognised the international dimensions of the Enlightenment, and included Scots, English, Germans and Italians as well as French in what he called the ...”

“... farming’. The horrors they witness will come as little surprise to anyone who has read Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, Felicity Lawrence, Eric Schlosser or any of the previous exposés of factory-farmed meat, but they make grim and startling reading even so. If you can get beyond the title, the great virtues of Farmageddon are its global reach and ...”

“... cover of Branson’s autobiography is replaced on Bower’s account by a cold-eyed and menacing prince of darkness. The dislike is much more visible in this book than in others Bower has written. Branson is berated for lacking conscience when at 23 he became a millionaire, although ‘wealth troubled many in that socialist era.’ There were also many it ...”

“... from 1988 to 1990. Or they saw various Bollywood versions, or the six-hour film version (1989) of Peter Brook’s nine-hour theatrical adaptation (1985). And now they can read Chindu Sreedharan’s ‘Epicretold’, posted on Twitter, one 140-character tweet at a time. The bare bones of the central story are these: the five sons of King Pandu, called the ...”

“... novel and an extended Bildungsroman, Pontoppidan’s narrative follows the vicissitudes of Peter Andreas (Per) Sidenius. Like the author, Per is born into a clergyman’s family in East Jutland in the 1850s. After defeat to Germany in the war of 1864, a third of Denmark’s territory is annexed, and the boy grows up in a period of national ...”

“... of the Royal Navy on the popular imagination of Britain is relatively recent, dating from what Peter Padfield refers to as the country’s ‘Navalist awakening’ in the last two decades of the 19th century, when the Admiralty’s dogma that ‘the best guarantee for the peace of the world is a supreme British fleet’ became the leading edge of Imperial ...”

“... mistaken as the war in Iraq, has somehow become the acceptable face of war. It’s maybe because Prince Harry was there (of which there’s some discussion with the Prince of Wales). But I suspect it’s more because we don’t hear much of the civilian population of Afghanistan and that ‘Johnny Taliban’ (in ...”