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“... clandestine eroticism come into the open, in a carnival of the damned. A convict called Broadway Rose put on a sex show, and the prison’s ‘boy-girls’ offered their services in cells covered by red curtains. In Himes’s ‘To What Red Hell’, it’s the fire that enables this liberation of desire, before extinguishing it: ‘Oh, Lawd, ma man’s ...”

“... one of Joyce’s collaborators, Michael Sonenscher, looks at the compagnonnages of 18th-century France. Journeymen in various trades practised a non-Christian ceremony of initiation into a devoir. The men concerned had overlapping skills concerned with building, furniture, leather. ‘The emergence of the compagnonnages – and their relative ubiquity ...”

“... which remains his most widely performed piece, was born of a different catastrophe: the fall of France in 1940. Mobilised as a stretcher-bearer a year earlier, Messiaen was captured by German soldiers in the woods near Nancy, and interned at Stalag VIIIA in Görlitz, Silesia. The conditions – the cold, the meagre rations – were gruelling, but a Catholic ...”

“... his lectern.The message worked well (some said too well) and Johnson’s own satisfaction ratings rose sharply after he was admitted to hospital with Covid-19. In mid-April, two-thirds of respondents said they were confident the government would provide accurate information about the pandemic. But public trust soon declined. By the start of June, only half of ...”

“... is a price you must pay for some victory over and above Pearse And Connolly and the ‘right rose tree’. It is, as he said, also ‘liable to bias’. The Queen at the wall in Ireland was not entirely unlike Willy Brandt at the Ghetto memorial. Whether ‘the ultimate reality must be anarchy’ who can presume to say? ‘Tradition is ...”

“... apart. And it had to do this with a Security Council divided among a hostile Soviet Union and France, a reluctant Britain, and a United States that viewed the entire enterprise through the spectacles of the Cold War. Ultimately the intervention can be said to have succeeded. A united Zaire (of a kind) did eventually emerge. But there was a universal ...”

“... of Art in London (where he fell in with David Hockney). His success was immediate and Ossie rose like froth to superstar dressmaker status in the Sixties London stylocracy. Ossie’s set, Lady H. explains included some of the most fascinating people of the era. Cecil Beaton entertained Ossie and Mick Jagger at his house ... Jagger invited Ossie to stay ...”

“... to a permanent presentation. But don’t expect to see anytime soon a display on how New York City rose to commercial prominence by financing and transporting the products of slave labour. This national desire to forget slavery stands in stark contrast to historians’ preoccupation with the subject – an example of the well-known disconnection between the ...”

“... simmering, which gells now one way, now another. Certainly graphic revolutions do occur, as in France in the eighth century and Byzantium in the ninth: in each case a new calligraphic script (for copying books) was deliberately created from the old cursive script (for writing documents), to serve the needs of a cultural revival. But Latin documentary ...”

“... do precisely this has taken him through almost every imaginable archive of relevance, in Britain, France and the Low Countries. He has shone light on how groups of legal and financially minded servants helped drive this period of ‘intensifying governance’ in England and northern Europe. Henry VII’s New Men and the Making of Tudor England is, in many ...”

“... however inadequate, as the last great military commander of the British Empire. ‘Wavell’s star rose high at an early stage of the war,’ his friend Basil Liddell Hart wrote. ‘The glow was the more brilliant because of the darkness of the sky.’ He entered the army in 1900, aged 17 and straight from school. Commissioned a year later, he was sent to ...”

“... having a son and putting out feelers for a career in politics and the City. He returned to France for a few months in 1918 in a job far from danger, but even then got sick and was, according to Simon Ball, ‘forced’ back to London. Unsurprisingly, what counted for the men of this generation was how a person had behaved in the war. Macmillan, taxed ...”

“... all from which we lived, becomes invisible.’ By 1907, Malevich had become involved with the Blue Rose group of artists, whose roots lay in Symbolism. He exhibited his work at the Moscow Society of Artists, along with Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova and Kandinsky. The following year, he attended the Golden Fleece Salon, an exhibition of two hundred ...”

“... they had at the same time to write like men, and even – following the example of George Sand in France – to adopt male names, like ‘Currer Bell’ and ‘George Eliot’. No wonder their achievement had been meagre: a handful of classics and ‘innumerable bad novels which have ceased to be recorded even in textbooks … novels that lie scattered like ...”

“... hiding out in a cottage in West Cork. The paintings were found unharmed in the boot of her car.Rose Dugdale wasn’t what anybody was expecting. For one thing, she was an English heiress, the daughter of a member of Lloyd’s of London who owned an estate in Devon. Born in 1941, she had lived a life of privilege: educated at Miss Ironside’s School for ...”