“... was presenting a radio programme and I thought she was talking about me when she spoke of a young man who had just lost his mother. Francis Pym said, ‘Guns fire from Number 10’ on the Sarah Kennedy show. I took this to mean the PM had given the order to sink the Belgrano. But Mr Pym was speaking in a different context. ...”

“... she found the kindest context for the dwarfishness of her hero, who she described as ‘a small man, not much smaller than Napoleon. He limped because of a club foot, as did Byron. Very clever, he got a scholarship to Heidelberg where he acquired his doctorate.’ Lady Mosley burbled on in this vein for a bit, spicing things up with references to ...”

“... published in Life magazine in 1969, Prince Karim Aga Khan was an ‘outrageously wealthy young man, written off by many as a mere playboy’, who had proved his critics wrong with a display of business acumen – a vast real-estate venture in Sardinia. Sailing across the Mediterranean on one of his yachts, the Aga Khan had fallen in love with its ...”

“... A group portrait from January 1924 arranges photographs of the young André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst and others in a grid around a mugshot of an even more youthful Germaine Berton, an anarchist who assassinated Marius Plateau, editor of the ultra-nationalist Action française. With titles like ‘Open the Prisons, Disband the Army’, the ...”

“... the US Army and the Coalition Provisional Authority, as the occupation administration is called. Paul Bremer, the head of the CPA, has his headquarters in the enormous Republican Palace beside the Tigris, where he and his staff live in an isolation comparable to Saddam’s. Then, in the mid-1990s, Saddam began to build enormous mosques, the largest of ...”

“... the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company. I consider, besides, that a man of 65, by dying, cuts off only a few years of infirmities.’ If he could choose to live a period of his life over again he might choose this one, the last. For Hume, nothing more needed to be said about waiting for death, a subject that we moderns have ...”

“... sock and a strikingly nonchalant slouch leans against a rugged wall beneath a sign saying ‘rue de Genets’. Specificity of place and texture is admirably juxtaposed with formal elegance in these images, which consistently make an analogy between the city wall and the plain surface of the paper on which they appear.Maar’s portraits of members of the ...”

“... theatrical in character, not to say camp’. Pevsner agreed: ‘very pretty’. It was the work of Paul Paget and John Seely, Lord Mottistone. In spirit, if not detail, it is heir to Colen Campbell’s Ebberston Hall near Scarborough: sprightly and miles away from Office of Works Georgian, RAF Neo-Georgian, War Office Georgian.Perhaps the Architecture of the ...”

“... neatness of design. Giles Fox, as the novel’s retrospect finds him, was once a fulfilled man – someone who could have represented the happy ending of some other story. He is a librarian and a scholar (his ‘period’ is ‘somewhere between 1213 and 1215’), and the best efforts of his intellectual maturity have been happily applied to editing a ...”

“... in the lives of the minor characters in Dr Zhivago is that they lived in the times of the great man; they could bear witness to the mystery and miracle of his existence. In his excellent book on the Russian Revolutionary novel Richard Freeborn discusses the many forerunners of Dr Zhivago, and implies, what is certainly the case, that the novels which had ...”

“... of Horace Vernet’s Mazeppa, to see that there is more than nice observation of weather in Paul Huet’s picture of a lonely rider, Storm at the End of the Day.Dumas’s novel mixes operatic themes with the odd sourly realistic vignette. The exhibition shows how two different visual cultures produced what lives side by side in the novel: scenes of ...”

“... feels that the 17th-century Dutch walls in Vermeer’s paintings are ‘as old as Egypt’. As a man Vermeer is little more to us than a signature. There is virtually no evidence for his artistic training, his character, or even his appearance, and his modest oeuvre – 35 canvases, not counting a couple of debatably attributed pieces – was unknown to the ...”

“... of Europe, the Ritters, Cabelleros and Chevaliers, so it marked the surnames of the ordinary man: the Smiths, Grooms, Carters, Wheelers, Wainwrights, Cartwrights, Jaggers, Packers and Sadlers.The rise of the steam engine actually increased the dependence on equine power. In the US, the number of horses and mules grew sixfold, to nearly 27.5 ...”

“... branch of science, his allusions from the literatures of a dozen languages; to understand him, a man must be a master of German indeed, spoken as well as written, and must know something of German life too.Hyndman apparently lacked any such talents. But what could one expect of a man who possessed only ‘a passable ...”

“... deeply flawed’), he told her he was ‘an argumentative, perpetually horny, middle-aged man’. (He’s 48.) Leathers said they had phone sex, used the word ‘love’ and discussed procuring a Chicago condo for a romp. (They never did meet in person.) She cast herself as a spurned victim at first but quickly gave that up. Now she just cashes ...”