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“... the only reason he was feeling better, however. On holiday in Corsica with his Harvard friend John Edsall in spring 1926, he took to reading Proust, and fastened on a passage from A la recherche that released him from his feelings of self-contempt by acknowledging the pervasiveness of human moral frailty – especially the ‘indifference to the ...”

“... had a bad stammer, and his puns were delivered with effort, after a period of voiceless struggle. John Clare described him approaching ‘a joke or a pun with an inward sort of utterance ere he can give it speech till his tongue becomes a sort of Packmans strop turning it over and over till at last it comes out wetted as keen as a razor.’ De Quincey ...”

“... consider was the inevitability of a clash between Jewish and Arab nationalism. Since Balfour and Lloyd George had had intimate experience of the clash of nationalisms and religions in Ireland, that was a pretty remarkable fit of absent-mindedness, particularly as they were warned by Curzon of the likely consequences of imposing heavy Jewish immigration on a ...”

“... is the spur stood on its head). But many prime ministers have fared less well: Chatham and Lord John Russell because there are few private papers; Gladstone and Salisbury because their careers were too long for any one writer to encompass comprehensively; Charles James Fox and Lloyd George because their passion to rule ...”

“... derives from the work of writers like William Blisset and Herbert Knust. I would have added John DiGaetani’s Richard Wagner and the Modern British Novel, which was published four years earlier, but Martin claims that a book of that title ‘by Bernard di Gaetani’ was ‘under preparation at the time of writing’. The chapter on Yeats is a tissue of ...”

“... at which the Liberals, during Asquith’s decline, vacated this position. From 1931, by which time Lloyd George’s radical fireworks had fizzled out, the Liberal leaders plunged into the National Government, thereby leaving Liberalism hopelessly marooned on the centre-right until around 1956, when it was rescued by the leadership of Jo Grimond and the Suez ...”

“... older than Brougham when he became ‘a political Ishmael’; Melbourne and Russell, Balfour and Lloyd George, were not significantly younger. That Brougham could ever have become prime minister is no doubt an improbable proposition, but his virtual eclipse at the age of 56 must constitute a problem in political history. It is a problem which Dr Stewart’s ...”

“... Parisians could hardly contain themselves during the first season of the Ballets Russes in 1909. John Singer Sargent’s painting, Vaslav Nijinsky in ‘Le Pavillon d’Armide’, captures the long-necked, outrageous spectacle of this new animal of dance. All of Proust’s characters were there in the audience, and they had never seen anything as exotic as ...”

“... presented himself at Oxford Police Station, he was asked to empty his pockets, and extracted John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty.’ He was duly sent to the Isle of Man. There was a separate camp for interned Italians, and after a while the commandant took pity on the three professors in his care – the economist Piero Sraffa, the philosopher Lorenzo ...”

“... dead.Netanyahu’s American enablers – Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin – swiftly echoed the Israeli prime minister’s celebration of Nasrallah’s death. Never mind that Netanyahu hadn’t consulted them about the bombing, which made a mockery of the American and French push for a ceasefire between Israel and ...”

“... the Swiss mountains as being cholera-free, but Stevenson fancied southern England. Fanny’s son, Lloyd Osbourne, was at school in Bournemouth. ‘It was lovely autumn weather when R.L.S. and my mother arrived,’ he wrote many years later. ‘They were in the highest spirits; everything pleased them; and they seemed not to have a care in the world.’ The ...”

“... has gone horribly wrong, and the solace the authors find in the architecture of Caruso St John or Eric Parry does not make up for it. No guide to London’s architecture has ever been so successful. Regularly updated from top to bottom every decade or so since its first publication in 1983 it obviously fulfils a need. There is no shortage of guides to ...”

“... Fine perceptions in this way are betrayed by being drawn into conventional channels. On Frank Lloyd Wright’s homes: ‘It is often difficult to see where to enter these homes, as though they did not wish to invite strangers at all’ – an accurate observation and an evocative one. But then, because privacy means privation, Fisher has to push it a step ...”

“... 155 east-west streets drawn on open land in 1807. The grid was a piece of real estate speculation (John Jacob Astor made his fortune not by trading furs, as American folklore has it, but by buying up blocks as the city pushed north); nevertheless, Koolhaas calls it, with Corbusierian hyperbole, ‘the most courageous act of prediction in Western ...”

“... part in this story, though classical architecture certainly was. Duveen’s favourite architect, John Russell Pope, supplied a mausoleum for the Huntingtons, adapted Frick’s townhouse as a public gallery and designed the National Gallery of Art. The increasingly difficult and radical character of modern art may have further reinforced these ...”