“... as well as the jacket – and matching hat. Four hundred white doves were meant to fly out of the grand pianos. (When they didn’t, Reid and Taupin ran around scaring the birds, which eventually flew off.)Elton became skilled at throwing tantrums. Early in 1974, while recording in the Rocky Mountains, he announced that he hated ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down ...”

“... feathers. ‘Distinction in garments’ was, they argued, invidious. Much later, Jacques-Louis David, the artist most identified with the revolution, was asked to come up with an alternative for parliamentarians, a costume that would evoke the dignity of the Greek and Roman republics. The result was a complicated outfit, involving tights, tunics and ...”

“... there appears a certain natural goodness verging on modesty.’ Three centuries later, in 1956, David Harris Willson’s biography took the hostile line. Scottish historians tended to be fairer, prompting Jenny Wormald to ask in 1983 whether James was ‘two kings or one?’, so different were his historical reputations north and south of the ...”

“... it a drawing-room with blue-grey walls and reproduction furniture in a Louis XV style, including a grand piano by Erard painted with putti and other pinky figures and a bow-fronted display cabinet containing porcelain and ivory figurines. French windows led to a terrace with steps down to a garden which had a long lawn and a large greenhouse.Upstairs there ...”

“... in order to increase use of the line and stimulate regeneration in those areas were all given the grand appellation ‘International’, though Eurostar trains don’t stop at Stratford and probably never will. The fact is that with a maximum of eight trains an hour, including domestic services, the line is operating at less than half its potential ...”

“... and once more the effect is to suggest that posterity has been barking up a single branch in the grand outspreading oak of a career. True, but it isn’t Pepys’s career which matters, except to the administrative historian. He is the master of a form which denies the teleology of outward progress, which relegates consequence in favour of subsequence, which ...”

“... failed to respond to this compliment with any valuable acknowledgment, Thomson, Aaron Hill and David Mallet prepared satirical verses on unsatisfactory patrons to preface the second edition of ‘Winter’. Compton stepped in in time (with civility and 20 guineas), and Thomson judiciously persuaded his friends to tone down their verses, or at least to ...”

“... structured by the motifs and conventions of revenge tragedy: resentment, conspiracy, delay, the grand soliloquy and, above all, tortured bodies.Reflecting on the prominence of ‘the morbid and the tragic’ in his own work, the Guyanese poet David Dabydeen once said that ‘the plantation experience had severe and ...”

“... the footstool and candelabra in the unfinished portrait of Madame Récamier when he was a pupil in David’s studio). The objects represented here can be traced from old inventories; indeed, an academic study exists devoted solely to Ingres’s eloquent mantelpieces. He shows not the slightest hint of embarrassment about the material expression of power ...”

“... satisfying and tautly constructed defence of ‘Thatcherism’ as theory, as policy and as a grand historical experiment. If these chapters are the intellectual spine of the book, there are others on the menu which flesh out the story of the Thatcher Government with more immediacy. For example, Chapter 3 describes how the Thatcher Government took ...”

“... later,New York was a far different city on this day than it was when he assumed the mayoralty from David Dinkins … You could read it in the numbers and feel it in the streets.Crime was down nearly 60 per cent. The murder rate was even lower; 1250 fewer New Yorkers were killed in 2000 than in 1993. Car thieves stole more than 111,000 vehicles the year before ...”

“... prints interviews with them, as if they were as respectable as the Shah of Iran. Dickson mentions David Bailey, who published a handsome photograph of the Twins, with an eloquent caption by Francis Wyndham, comparing them with Humphrey Bogart. It was the little public-school gang of Private Eye that broke through the hype: larger journals seemed awed by the ...”

“... in the Louvre and it reopened in 1818 as a gallery for pictures by great living artists (including David, then in political exile). The creation of the first European museum of modern art was thus something of an expedient, but the political impulse behind it was not ephemeral. No subsequent French regime dared to neglect it. Unsurprisingly, the character of ...”

“... thought is that Rothko has been vindicated. He has become an old master: recognisable, inimitable, grand. The second is that to achieve this safe place is to lose the power to terrify which accompanies the ascent from one unsteady foothold to another. There are bodies of work in which that does not matter, but with Rothko when you come back to the remembered ...”

“... and stones: it had indeed been put up in a hurry. Although we have been cured of follies on the grand scale by planning laws, the urgent need to build and decorate can still become detached from a monitoring sense of function. Almost the last example in the book is a bus, parked in a garden on South Uist, which the owner has covered in patterns with shells ...”