“... a move away from ‘pure blood vengeance’ to democracy, politics and law. Ziolkowski’s grand comparative idea involves lots of details with which readers may disagree, and many questions remain unanswered. One central issue that deserves more discussion is whether the title is an oxymoron. Can heroes hesitate and still be heroic? Is there any ...”

“... its dust-jacket) there is a good colour illustration of a self-portrait and still-life painted by David Bailly of Leiden in 1651. A young artist (is it too ingenious to suggest that it represents Bailly himself as a young man?) holds Bailly’s portrait on a table where a wide variety of other works of art appear together with a candle, a skull, an hourglass ...”

“... and powerful friends. She had been a celebrity on What’s My Line? and lives on as the subject of David Bowie’s song ‘God Knows I’m Good’. God knows what the authorities would do to a hardened, inarticulate sneak thief from the lower classes. And even if the magistrates were in a forgiving mood, what about the shame? My grandmother had neither a lucid ...”

“... it, and their prescriptions range from an immediate moratorium on military interventions to a ‘grand strategy for the many’ that seeks to direct US power to eco-socialist ends. But another powerful set of critiques of ‘muscular liberal internationalism’ have come from an older cadre of conservatives. John Mearsheimer and ...”

“... right words, I will never know, because he knows what I do not, how to keep things to himself. David Sedaris had invited me to read alongside him that night at UCLA, but before that we had the whole day. We took a cab first to Venice Beach, so that Jason could pay homage to Arnold Schwarzenegger. ‘Remember when he says that he feels the pump and it’s ...”

“... Strategy, a firm co-founded by Vote Leave’s head of communications and a former speechwriter for David Cameron, whose clients include Citibank, Spotify and Deliveroo. In all, according to analysis by the New Statesman, more than four times as many lobbyists as teachers ran for Parliament in July.The closer Labour got to power, the closer the business lobby ...”

“... small, hard and exquisite. Mimesis has been abandoned; the symbolic shell looks nothing like the grand confluence it will commemorate. The poet is resigned to the almost comic indifference of the public to her art. As she takes the wasps’ nest on board ship, an ironic vignette ends the poem: Back on board, a fellow-passenger, Mr Swan, Dutch, the retiring ...”

“... Slessor’s good works on the Upper Niger still earn her an image on Scottish banknotes, while David Livingstone became the world’s best-known Scotsman. They did not save many souls. After 50 years’ work in India, the missions could show only 3359 converts. But their influence on empire was deep and paradoxical, at once the advance guard of colonialism ...”

“... a matter of style and partly of substance. He may not be the greatest living exponent of the grand manner in politics – not while Harold Macmillan is happily still with us – but he has made it his stock-in-trade. It does not make for intimacy of collaboration, as David Owen recognised in coining the soubriquet ...”

“... the examples our lawmakers bear in mind when they frame a policy of response in the days to come. David Bromwich New Haven The news from the Middle East is not all bad. The savagery of the attacks on 11 September has, in at least one country, brought Muslim militancy into disrepute and swelled the ranks of the moderates. At the main public prayers in Tehran ...”

“... and Dr O’Brien has set out to depict the ‘great melody’ as formed by what he was and by the grand issues – the themes to which the subtitle alludes – to which he gave himself. This is not a post-modernist study, in which the author vanishes into the text and the text is decomposed into the several acts of power discerned by an omniscient if ...”

“... and history, wore nail polish and borrowed his sister’s fun-fur jacket. He took Deborah to hear David Bowie and Lou Reed, and read her Oscar Wilde, Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn. He showed her a ring binder containing sections labelled ‘Lyrics’ and ‘Novel’. ‘I felt privileged that he had trusted me enough to let me see the extent of his ...”

“... Behind​ its grand and oblique title, derived rather surprisingly from Kipling, Mathias Enard’s new book is a fictional account, no more than novella length, of a visit by Michelangelo to Constantinople in 1506. Sultan Bayezid II had already commissioned a design for a bridge over the Golden Horn from Leonardo da Vinci, and rejected it ...”

“... Daily Express) to a certain air of breezy informality. But there was also more than a touch of the grand seigneur about him – reflected in his automatic assumption that, whenever a town fell into Allied hands, it was his right to commandeer its best hotel. Since he worked very much in concert with his two principal competitors – Alexander Clifford of the ...”

“... official theory. He was always willing to turn his hand to history painting, in his version of the grand style, when commissions were available; but he also produced paintings in a new kind of genre, the ‘modern moral subject’, the ‘progress’, which were sometimes described as comic history painting, and which may have contained the implication that ...”