“... and pheasant to the boys after the annual Ritterakademie ball led to a raid on the stores by a young Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau. General Schleicher dined well at Horcher’s restaurant; Frau Ebert was partial to marzipan tart. General Seeckt drank beer, Ernst Röhm drank wine, Herbert Bismarck drank practically anything (like father, like son). A jolly ...”

“... Karl Löwith were beginning to work through the Weberian legacy, and Heidelberg was home also to a young American called Talcott Parsons, who later presented his own straitjacketed, functionalist version of Weber to an American public, with whom it proved immensely influential – a version that was re-exported back to post-war West Germany as the intellectual ...”

“... their anarchic force and the opposing force holding them in position. Writing in 1896-7, the young Bernhard Berenson spoke of ‘the exquisite modelling of Cézanne, who gives the sky its tactile values as perfectly as Michelangelo has given them to the human figure’. Michelangelo’s is not one of the names commonly brought up in talk about ...”

“... argues for the latter and points out that Wainwright happily organised group outings when he was a young accountant’s clerk. When the couple became estranged, he argues, Wainwright accepted the necessity of being solitary and manufactured virtues from it. It seems more complex than that. I think he embraced the necessity. Assiduously he secreted the ...”

“... not go away. Serious writers seem unable to keep their hands off him, from Beryl Bainbridge’s Young Adolf to George Steiner’s A.H., and the bibliography grows at a pace unmatched by Stalin or Mao. A survey five years ago counted 120,000 pieces of work on Hitler. We have had serious biographers, like Alan Bullock and Joachim Fest, and we have had ...”

“... each of which ended with the resounding failure of the prime minister’s presidential bid.The young Mitterrand’s intuition that the president’s powers would keep growing has proved correct. In 2000, constitutional reform sought to make the risk of cohabitation less likely, by aligning the president’s term with that of the National Assembly: it was ...”

“... twenty years after her death, still drew the crowds. Last year Prince Charles came higher than David Gandy and David Beckham in GQ’s rankings for best-dressed Briton. The queen has been a global celebrity longer than anyone anywhere.The contract between the royal family and the nation thus relies on a curious bargain ...”

“... But those were different times and, though the New Statesman’s challenge was echoed by the Young Liberals, Thorpe showed no inclination to rise to it. Instead, he tamely resigned the leadership of his Party. The consequences, even if no one then could precisely have foreseen them, were protracted and macabre: a serious criminal charge leading to a ...”

“... was a better one than most. There is a world of evasion in those words. These two intelligent young men, who could serve their readers with an adult judgment, are still under the spell of wry soldiers’ talk. And yet it is true that the war was ‘neat and tidy’, if only because it was over so fast – too fast for the anti-war opposition at home to ...”

“... part of the province’s culture. The first night, I sit up with the film’s director, David Hammond, adding bits to the script. We’re in the sunroom, as he calls it – a big glass-domed upstairs sitting-room at the back of his house. Purple summer dark, stars, streetlights climbing Divis, or the Black Mountain, as it’s called. We stare out at ...”

“... as in the lion and the bull’, and then hints that this may be why Michelangelo portrayed David frowning. But surely an explanation would only be needed if David, who is waiting for the big kill, was not frowning. Summers also wants to believe that someone introduced the ...”

“... the claws were bared less often. These extracts, chosen by Benson’s splendid biographer, David Newsome, from among the four million words of the diaries Benson left as his memorial, are taken from a period in Benson’s life when he was uncertain and hypersensitive, so the claws are out. It was at the turn of the century, and Benson, having been ...”

“... a right to give laws to Americans. When the Clinton impeachment was going forward, Obama was a young Chicago politician with other things on his mind. He could have learned something then about how the Republicans work. The most questionable of his appeals in the primary campaign against Hillary Clinton was the endlessly repeated bromide with which he ...”

“... David Kohn opens his monumental Darwinian Heritage with a deftly-delivered kick, observing that a study of the wider institutional culture of Darwin’s day seems to be ‘beyond the present ken of historians of 19th-century biology’. It’s a well-aimed blow. Little of the Darwin industry’s capital has been spent on exploring evolution in its social context ...”

“... Kallman in tow) pressed his suit on whatever composers he could. Henze accepted it (Elegy for Young Lovers, The Bassarids); Tippett and Harrison Birtwistle resisted. The latter has worked fruitfully (the small-scale pieces Bow Down and Yan Tan Tethera) with Tony Harrison, another poet avid for theatrical and operatic activity; and his most recent ...”