“... two of her ‘Japanese’ prints in an episode of the TV show Civilisations, while in a later one David Olusoga brought In the Loge to his argument. A print from 1896 In Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1877-78) a girl of perhaps six or seven half-sits, half-lies, in large armchair. She looks as if she has originally been posed, in a white lacy dress with ...”

“... England, Indian food was thought to be anything sprinkled with curry powder: a substance Elizabeth David described as ‘unlikeable, harshly flavoured, and possessed of an aroma clinging and as all-pervading in its way as that of English boiled cabbage or cauliflower’. ‘To me the word “curry” is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the term ...”

“... treatments of different kinds by Michael Sherborne (2010) and Adam Roberts (2019), plus David Lodge’s fictionalised rendering of Wells’s life in A Man of Parts (2011), while four fully annotated volumes of his letters came out in 1998. Claire Tomalin is one of the most highly acclaimed biographers of our time, with numerous prizes and accolades ...”

“... Menzel was one of the two foremost German painters of the 19th century, the other being Caspar David Friedrich.’ Unusually, he was an illustrator before he turning to painting, and towards the end of his life he turned away from painting again, devoting himself mainly to drawing. A dwarf, born in Breslau in 1815, he grew up in the milieu of his ...”

“... and Earl Raab’s The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970 (1970) and David Bennett’s The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (1988), which identify a persistent crackpot fringe on the margins of American politics. Instead, Morone contends that the hardliners have shaped some of the central ...”

“... the sons of his friends and former colleagues are swimming with the New Labour tide: Edward and David Miliband, sons of his old friend Ralph; Charles Clarke, son of Benn’s former Permanent Secretary, and so on. Some of the most poignant moments come when the Millbank machine tries to whip in its oldest member, reducing him in May 1999 to writing ...”

“... successfully) and his lawyer friend Cesare Previti (largely unsuccessfully). As for David Mills, one wonders what other revelations wait to be retrieved, by journalists or historians, from the dimly lit world of the two Mr Bs. In the autumn of 2005 Berlusconi’s coalition lagged behind the centre-left by ten electoral points. His opponents, who ...”

“... New Year visit to the Mallorcan villa of the BBC television presenter Kirsty Wark. More recently, David McLetchie, the Scottish Conservative leader, who had, naturally enough, helped to fan the flames of previous scandals, was himself brought down by ‘Taxigate’, which concerned his misleading expenses claims for taxis on supposed parliamentary ...”

“... gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster Wallace (b.1962), the previous generation’s experimentalism was as much a way of looking at society as a renovation of novelistic technique. Writers their grouchier teachers viewed as rebarbatively modish or futuristic struck them as fairly ...”

“... to this nouvelle vague of meekness, tendresse, womanliness, the glowing, melting sentiments, while David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie and James Macpherson weighed in from North of the border. The Irish were never just gorillas with gelignite. Those Irish historians who play down the anti-Irishness of the British for their own political ends are right to ...”

“... most of his readers will take to be basic human rights. We have only to look at Michelangelo’s David, carved for the revived Florentine Republic in 1504, to know what it felt like to be rid of the Medici, and to appreciate the civic spirit their dynasty had subdued with its sinister charm. Florentine civic spirit, like that of ancient Athens, was largely ...”

“... has come to a head faster than expected as a result of the Scottish independence referendum and David Cameron’s political ambition. Labour has (or had) an electoral interest in keeping Scotland in the Union. The Conservatives do not. Their loyalty to the United Kingdom is sentimental, not electoral. The practical argument against Scottish independence was ...”

“... of US debt. The deal on offer to the Republicans was described by the conservative commentator David Brooks as ‘the deal of the century’, offering ‘trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred billion dollars of revenue increases’: A normal Republican Party would seize the opportunity to put a long-term limit on the growth ...”

“... was spun, and the interplay of developments in London and beyond. In a richly documented vignette David Hayton shows how Irish Tories indulged in Sacheverellism by proxy, championing the cause of their own ‘red-faced, roaring’ militant High Churchman, Francis Higgins. Later they delighted in the fortunes of the Tory lawyer Constantine Phipps, whose ...”

“... the contempt of his family and peers) into his first English work: ‘The Chalenge’ [sic], a sci-fi tale about the racial tensions between an Earth-like planet called Atlanta (‘with its conservative politics and strong retail base’) and Lopes (a hot Latin land populated by three-legged inhabitants and ‘many parrots’). Its hero is not an Igor/Gary ...”