“... John Singer Sargent has often been accused of lacking a soul. Even Henry James, who helped introduce him to the London scene in the 1880s and continued to promote his work, worried that he suffered from a ‘sort of excess of cleverness’. The fact that Sargent catered to a transatlantic clientele of celebrities and nouveaux riches at the height of the Gilded Age only encouraged the imputations of superficiality ...”

“... singular clarity on this subject never immunised him against narcotics. The apomorphine cure he took in Britain, touted in Junky as his final release from hell, was in reality short-lived, but it persisted as an article of faith in the legend spun around him. When, around 1980, he slipped into permanent relapse (which, after moving to Kansas from New ...”

“... are vampires, with little ultra-patriotic bite marks on their necks. The early symptoms often took the form of harmless scepticism about the protests in Ukraine and whether they were genuine. ‘Who is behind the Maidan?’ people would write, or they’d say: ‘Those poor Ukrainians are being taken for a ride.’ Soon the conspiracy-mongering got ...”

“... the Americans pulled out in 2011, and at the start of this year, under Baghdadi’s leadership, took over most of two towns which the US had made huge efforts to secure: Fallujah and Ramadi. These were major symbolic victories that helped establish Baghdadi’s reputation as the world’s foremost jihadi leader. Unlike al-Qaida’s Zawahiri, he was winning ...”

“... by a Thai Communist hit squad in Bangkok later that year. How much​ did the British know? John Davis, the Force 136 man who was closest to Chin Peng, Lai Tek’s successor as MCP leader, had been in the prewar Special Branch. He knew the secret of Mr Wright, but did not tell his comrade. Anyway, the end of the war brought a new situation. In Indochina ...”

“... global economy, such as tea, silk, porcelain and printed calicoes. After the European economies took off decisively in the 19th century, it became plausible for the first time to propagate the myth of China’s epochal stagnation. During the Great Exhibition of 1851, Charles Dickens and Richard Horne wrote a piece for Household Words that contrasted the ...”

“... must put a ban on the Jews.’ Marcus found himself friendless; his grades plummeted; he took out his bitterness in a student paper called the Saturday Evening Pest. ‘The whole institution is a lie,’ he wrote of Yale, ‘and serves as a cloak of respectability for a social and athletic club.’ After two years, he dropped out, moved to ...”

“... clarity of seeing, an acknowledgment that this is what painting is. Just as the young John Richardson, visiting Braque’s studio for the first time, felt that he had arrived ‘at the very heart of painting’. But these apparently quiet artists often turn out to have been more far-sighted and more radical than we assume. Corot, for example, once ...”

“... did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and Washington Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1849). Forster and Irving built on Prior’s research to reinstate – affectionately, but still damagingly – the simple, unworldly ...”

“... mine. For love and family in her case; in mine, improbably and occasionally grimly, for work. It took me a while to get used to G, as I’d like coyly to go on calling it. I started off part-time. Like Persephone, one term in two. I bought a lady’s bicycle and slept on a colleague’s Vietnam-era camp-bed in a short-let plywood apartment (‘it’s called ...”

“... demise seemed in keeping with this general impression of hopelessness. ‘I cannot say his death took me altogether by surprise,’ Arnold confided to a friend. ‘I had long a foreboding something was deeply wrong with him.’Though his biographers have never been able to decide whether Clough was an utterly singular or thoroughly representative figure (Mr ...”

“... communicable diseases and to read the warning signs of impending distress. In a paper from 1976, John Rivers of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine described the shift from severe poverty to famine as like freezing water turning to ice: it’s not just a lower temperature, but a change in state. During the early stages of a food crisis, the ...”

“... Wedding. It is summer, and 12-year-old Frankie Addams sits at the kitchen table with her cousin John Henry and her black cook Berenice and digs a splinter out of her foot with a knife. The three play bridge with an incomplete deck and they talk until their words almost seem to rhyme. They are a group, but a group Frankie wishes desperately not to belong ...”

“... more concerned about keeping its plans secret from Washington. Some Americans, including Senator John F. Kennedy, already supported Algerian independence. Oil and gas had been found in Algeria, and French intelligence had discovered that American oil companies were in correspondence with an FLN leader, Ahmed Ben Bella, about possible oil leases. This was ...”

“... un-regally, being a ‘mother’s boy’. In the popular estimation he probably outranks Bad King John and Wicked King Richard III as the worst ever English king. He has this terrible reputation largely because of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This composite work is thought to have been first compiled in the 890s under the auspices of King Alfred, then copied ...”