“... feelings in their faces.’ Hitchcock’s films are informed by the sense that pleasant faces may conceal murderous feelings. Respectable appearances repeatedly dissolve into extraordinary menace. Benign professors whip out guns, as do nuns and housekeepers. Being afraid that friendly looks might fade to an ominous black stare isn’t, of course, an ...”

“... through his mind had Phoebus cast The radiance of his own divinity. Nearer the gods no mortal may approach. Halley meant it – he was in love with Newton’s ‘divine Treatise’ – and history has repaid him accordingly. To the late Victorians Halley was a Good Second: ‘the second most illustrious of Anglo-Saxon philosophers’. If you want to ...”

“... King reports here, is the only surviving 18th-century African artefact associated with slavery. David Dabydeen has pointed out that the very word ‘patron’ could at this point mean both connoisseur and slave-owner. It would be intriguing to know whether the peculiar interest which Sloane had in tobacco and its paraphernalia was connected with his other ...”

“... just wanted a job, were, for Peter York, people who more than anything lacked imagination. And he may after all be right about that: somewhere in the air of the Eighties imagination became tied to money, a lot of it, and individualism was to do with the having and getting of it, the spending of it; personality was about how you expressed yourself as a ...”

“... called A la Recherche du Shoe Perdu. Warhol’s pretty shoes, we gather from other sources, may in fact be inky revelations of something fairly robust in the artist’s character. He was a foot-fetishist. The New York poet John Giorno, an old boyfriend of the bewigged one, gave an account several years ago of what his pal liked to do on his nights ...”

“... every visitor as if they were a ten-year-old on a school project. On the other hand, while we may enjoy the theatricality of Strong’s remake and welcome the reminders about when and where the Battle of Newbury was, we inevitably regret the removal of large numbers of paintings to make way for all these trimmings and chafe at the intrusive packaging of ...”

“... dat animum (‘It is the holy love of the fatherland which moves us’). Half a century ago, Dom David Knowles, doyen of humane medievalism, hailed the MGH among the ‘great historical enterprises’, which it certainly was (and is) despite its original nationalist agenda. Medievalist Wissenschaft (the term has scientific connotations largely absent from ...”

“... idle, self-pitying, cruel and unscrupulous. Nor were his brothers much better. Probably, as David Cannadine has written, the lives, loves and morals of George III’s children made them ‘the most unloved royal generation in English history’; though the previous one, the brothers of George III, must have run them pretty close. George behaved like a ...”

“... It was a remarkable time at the Slade – his other classmates included Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, David Bomberg and William Roberts – and a revolutionary moment in British art. Even to express support for Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibitions was daring and radical. Nevinson, having seen a contemporary art show in Venice, knew he was ‘bored with ...”

“... Mosul, Picot was unaware that Kitchener and Sykes were secretly planning to give it to him,’ David Fromkin wrote in A Peace to End All Peace (1989). ‘They wanted the French sphere of influence to be extended from the Mediterranean coast on the west all the way to the east so that it paralleled and adjoined Russian-held zones; the French zone was to ...”

“... so intellectual supporters of the Iraq War – among them Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick and other prominent figures in the North American liberal establishment – have focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush for giving ...”

“... a shortcoming emphasised by Girvin. Exasperated, the US representative in Dublin, David Gray, complained that ‘this running a government on hatred for another country is a very dangerous thing and is bound to land him [de Valera] on the scrap heap eventually.’ He couldn’t have been more wrong. ‘Emergency’ was also a technical ...”

“... remain; you can always have recourse to the landscape, and it will never leave you, though you may leave it. Leaving home and returning are the main narratives. Rivers and roads, the long-distance elements of the landscape, are the geographical refrains of the genre. Williams’s lost highway is a metaphysical condition more than a place, a sort of Dantean ...”

“... can say you are.’ As with the opposition, the toilet doors ‘bang increasingly frequently’. David Kirk, acting captain from the start of the tournament: ‘Remember, you’re the All Blacks. You carry with you the memory of the past. That’s a force.’ Andy Dalton, the nominated captain who failed to play a single match because of a training ...”

“... but no president of Palestine. ‘A society in crisis forges a new vocabulary for itself,’ David Grossman wrote in The Yellow Wind, ‘and gradually, a new language emerges whose words . . . no longer describe reality, but attempt, instead, to conceal it.’ This ‘new language’ was adopted voluntarily by the media, but if one needs an official ...”