“... 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 ...”

“... turns out to be less unlikely than it might sound: it seems that Bentham repeatedly wrote to David Collins, Lieutenant-Governor of the Port Philip colony, encouraging him to build a panopticon in New South Wales. A convict called Pobjoy exists in history, as does a penal chronicler called Lemprière, who worked at Macquarie Harbour as a storekeeper ...”

“... Malawi. I am thinking of Kenneth Mdala’s suggestions for the memorials to Queen Victoria and David Livingstone – suggestions which I somewhat desperately, and ultimately unsuccessfully, attempted to interpret as ironic. Victoria was for Kenneth Mdala, as for many Africans, an icon. She was the ‘great mother’, the guarantor of British fairness to ...”

“... twinklers of an hour, provoke my rage’) for Pope himself. Gerrard follows Howard Weinbrot and David Fairer in championing Hill’s biblical odes The Creation (1720) and The Judgment Day (1721) as significant expositions of the sublime in an age addicted to correctness; but the argument isn’t likely to persuade readers confronted by lines as poor as the ...”

“... of which he had for many years been a generous benefactor), and suggested he instead see David Blumenthal, a cousin and one of the best cardiologists in New York. Blumenthal ran a series of tests, told Ben his heart would soon fail, and put him under the knife. The valve was replaced successfully. But there was a problem. A few weeks later, a stitch ...”

“... of his collection that Greenberg didn’t miss the art he sold, but surely he winced as works by David Smith, Jackson Pollock or Morris Louis went out the door.* His enthusiasm for these artists, particularly Noland and Louis, undercuts the common misperception that he saw purity and flatness as modern art’s defining achievement. Greenberg came to distance ...”

“... the French Ambassador. The patriotic hero, it turned out, had venally conspired with foreigners. David Hume, who had earlier mocked the Sidney cult, found it ‘amusing to observe the general and I may say national rage’. Shortly after the exposure of Sidney, John Wilkes – in the House of Commons, of all places – extolled Cromwell’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from the outside is what drives The Picture of Dorian Gray, or Frankenstein, or the films of David Lynch. To watch yourself from outside is, according to the textbook, to watch yourself as dead – and both Hall and his hero understand this all too well. Holed up in his flat, Eric Sanderson reads letter after letter sent to him by ‘the First Eric ...”

“... out of a difficult life is an idea that some moderns have endorsed. In his ‘Essay on Suicide’, David Hume thought it would be strange for God to deny us an option that even a malaria mosquito could inflict; Georges Poulet disagreeably proclaimed that death by one’s own hand is the only act that avoids the twin perils of a meaningless existence and a ...”