“... and ministries were made and unmade. Furthermore, during this period the House of Commons was the Grand Inquest not just of the Nation, but of nations. Having taken over the affairs of Scotland in 1707 and of Ireland in 1801, it now arbitrated the affairs of Europe and oversaw a global empire. Members were voting on issues as diverse as juries in New South ...”

“... beautiful, a small glimpse of Granada in the middle of West Yorkshire, though it was nothing more grand than a warehouse. And he wasn’t content with providing just one water spout for visitors to Roundhay Park: his circular fountain has eight. Four on the outside walls, four on the inside. What munificence! Today, not one of the spouts works. Park users are ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... image is trapped inside the prism. No one around you can see it – it’s almost a hallucination. David Hockney, who took up drawing with a modern camera lucida in 1999, described it in Secret Knowledge (2001) as projecting not ‘a real image of the subject, but an illusion of one in the eye’:At first I found the camera lucida very difficult to use ...”

“... Hazan’s book is thick with quotations from Balzac’s novels and stories. The translator, David Fernbach, had to decide how to handle them: translate them himself, or seek out existing versions? Understandably, he adopted the latter course, but in some cases he chooses Katherine Prescott Wormeley’s translations from the late 19th century, which are ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... last, Fait et à faire, last February. This was soon followed by The Castoriadis Reader, edited by David Ames Curtis, Castoriadis’s major expositor in the English-speaking world: a festschrift edited by Curtis appeared last May as an issue of the journal, Thesis Eleven, which has been a major platform for Castoriadis’s ideas. In later life, Castoriadis ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... original sin, secularised as the problem of anti-social behaviour, has been remarkably resilient. David Trotter believes that what we have learned to call Modernism is more akin to the cumulative trauma of secularisation, and that if we can’t get a wholly convincing sense of the beginnings of Modernism, we can get the next best thing: a sense of what the ...”

“... others, ‘Foster’ delivers it, and more: the office offers moral uplift in beautiful forms on a grand scale. Go, new millennium, ‘Foster’ seems to proclaim with each new ...”

“... were not strictly personal property. In his essay on Warsaw apartments in the 1950s and 1960s, David Crowley quotes Czeslaw Milosz’s remark that ‘to protect his position and his apartment (which he has by the grace of the state), the intellectual is prepared to make any sacrifice or compromise; for the value of privacy in a society that affords little ...”

“... reported case of human infection with the Zika virus was in 1964. Another Entebbe virologist, David Simpson, had a 36-hour fever, some back pain, a headache and a rash. Three days later he had recovered apart from some spots. For many years the Zika virus was thought to be unimportant. There was no evidence to suggest that it could do anything more than ...”

“... it is elevated to a sublime combination of nature and architecture, as if painted by Caspar David Friedrich, or by Pückler’s friend Friedrich Schinkel, then the leading architect in Berlin: standing in that allée of ivy-clad columns … you see them recede in perspective until they come together three hundred feet ahead of you, terminating in a ...”

“... of streets, eliminating, inter alia, many early 19th-century cottages, Victorian terraces and a grand 15th-century house that was home to the Swan School. For years a ‘road to nowhere’ (in fact to an unbuilt car park) stood on piloti above the surviving houses. A succession of streets ends incoherently in blind walls and service roads. Completeness is ...”