“... claim was by lineal descent from Edward III, and was a strong one if you ignored the deposition of Richard II in 1399. In the mid-1450s, Richard, Duke of York, Edward’s father and England’s pushiest peer, had twice attempted to sideline Henry VI, who suffered from lengthy spells of mental illness and was repelled by the ...”

“... figure, this time mediated by music, Staël’s second great love, in which again his tastes were broad. He loved classical music, he loved the Second Vienna School, above all Webern, and he loved jazz. The musical event that occasioned the second return to the figure was a revival in 1952 of Rameau’s Les Indes galantes, which had not been seen for two ...”

“... made journalistic illustration largely redundant, and this, in collaboration with the whole broad tendency toward scientific observation, led artists to turn away from the social scene in favour of a more absorbing field of view, the drama of their private senses and sensibilities as recorded in impressionism. New languages in fiction and art replaced ...”

“... and Patristic writings, in philosophy and logic and the development of modern science. He has very broad aesthetic interests, and writes with true sympathy about Celtic manuscripts and the Flemish masters, about Courbet and the sculptors of Moissac, about early Christian mosaics and Rembrandt and the New York School. He has a natural love for what I suspect is ...”

“... is superimposed upside down on the black, red and gold of the present-day German flag, rendered in broad brushstrokes that begin at the top and end raggedly at the bottom, giving it a frayed and bedraggled appearance. As the British Museum’s director, Neil MacGregor, says in the book published to accompany the exhibition and a parallel series of broadcasts ...”

“... artwork. ‘Cistern in the Park of Château Noir’ (1895). Artworks are narrow while art is broad. You catch glimpses here of the outward flow. The Gauguin of 1889 still dreams of well-resolved figurines, so a haunting little clay effigy suggests, whereas by 1897 he is a performance artist putting out bad-boy bluster – a lewd, crude nameplate for his ...”

“... Rosenquist retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York until 25 January is President Elect: a broad headshot of a beaming JFK, manicured fingers with a piece of cake, and the sleek side of a pale green sedan. A collage study reveals the sources to be a campaign poster and two magazine ads; cropped and gridded, then painted on canvas, the images promise ...”

“... the maiden speech for which he was instantly awarded the Garter. When I joined, I discovered that Richard Adrian is quite right: it is like a prep school. There are any number of corridors down which to get lost. Nobody tells you how to find the Gents, and you’re too shy to ask. The rituals are as arcane to the newcomer as they are familiar to the old ...”

“... as François Truffaut’s Day for Night. As a double-edged reminder that it is on the director’s broad shoulders that the success of the enterprise ultimately rests, and that it is only in his head that the complete formula is held, Truffaut cast himself as the abstracted but notably phlegmatic Ferrand. Today, 12 years after Truffaut’s tribute to cinema ...”

“... I eat my lunch sitting under the statue of Charles James Fox in Bloomsbury Square. There are broad steps on each side of the statue, their Portland stone now stained an aqueous green, and I like to sit beneath and between Fox’s feet, looking, with him, down Bedford Place and towards Russell Square. Like most fat men in statuary (and in life), Fox is ...”

“... who is the Royal Academy’s ‘secretary’ in charge of exhibitions, places Sensation in a very broad art historical context, making ambitious claims for the importance of the work and explaining his choice of title. Next, Richard Shone, an associate editor of the Burlington Magazine, perhaps best known for his scholarly ...”

“... elected president. Lugo embarked on negotiations with the existing opposition groups, and formed a broad electoral alliance with a progressive programme. The Alianza Patriótica para el Cambio was created in August 2006 from a wide spectrum of social movements, trade unions and a dozen small political parties – including the Christian Democrats, socialists ...”

“... hellish’ onset of night as a black pall lowered without the reassuring interval of dusk. Richard Mabey stands admirably within this tradition, not only as a naturalist and writer on British flora and fauna, but as an expert on inner and outer weather: his Nature Cure (2005) records a bout of severe depression and a re-emergence two years ...”

“... in 1764. Woodcut illustrations, scanty before the 19th century, can be found as early as 1681 in Richard Burton’s Historical Remarques. The great age of the London guidebook began, however, in the middle of the 19th century, as David Webb has shown in the London Journal (1980, No 2). One important development illustrates nicely that odd relationship ...”

“... to Yingluck’s enemies. Her worst mistake, though, was a bill that would have delivered a broad amnesty for crimes associated with the political turmoil of the post-coup years. Among its beneficiaries would have been Abhisit, who has been charged with child murder in the aftermath of the 2010 crackdown on the Red Shirts – and at this even some of ...”