“... During the 1760s, he took every opportunity to escape from his parochial duties, twice going on Grand Tours as companion to rich men’s sons. On the second occasion he went with an introduction to Wilkes, who was in exile in Paris, avoiding trial. When Wilkes returned to fight the famous Middlesex election of 1768, Horne played a key role in his ...”

“... a social drama of heartache and struggle equal to the torments and terrors of Arthur Miller or David Mamet’s salesmen. As Zdatny explains and Long complains, hairdressers were at the bottom of a hierarchy of fashion, helpless in the face of the couturiers of the great fashion houses who kept their models’ hair short and simple so as not to distract ...”

“... about the lepidoptera. The second is an anecdote about Professor Stanley Gardiner and Inspector David of the Cambridge Police. The third records a moment in 1944 when Rothschild just happened to be the senior British officer in Paris and had a delicate passage with the Préfet and our ambassador Duff Cooper about the latter’s relations with Madame Louise ...”

“... is telling enough. Nor are those fractures and alienations necessarily uncommunicative. The grand illusion which, yes, alienates, estranges, both our exceptionally gifted Marxist composers from real people the reader will note without surprise. In Henze’s words, I could envisage composing becoming something that all people could do, simply by taking ...”

“... Overseas service, for which he volunteered, introduced him to life in commandeered luxury liners, grand hotels, special trains. Footloose in Cape Town he spied the first locomotive ever to work in the Cape Colony, a small tank engine built in Leith in 1859. From Bombay he rode 1400 miles by Frontier Mail to Rawalpindi, where he was given a bearer and a dhobi ...”

“... The index is on view in a chamber at the side of a magnificent crypt with a marble Star of David commemorating all six million who died in the Holocaust. The files are on loan from the state archives. A second site opened in 2012. It overlooks La Muette, a housing project in Drancy begun in the 1930s and still unfinished when it was requisitioned by ...”

“... I had satisfied this naive touristic urge there was a disaster to confront. The closure of the Grand Banks cod fishery was slowly overwhelming this large island. Newfoundland’s waters had been exploited by Spanish, Portuguese and Cornish fishermen since at least the 16th century. Theirs was a hugely profitable industry that supplied the whole of Catholic ...”

“... or literary career barely begun, or that authors suffer from the sense of being footnotes to the grand poets of an earlier age. Wilson tells us that the precocious emperor despised the old, mocking the grey hairs on a victim’s head. With everyone in a hurry to make hay while the fierce and unpredictable imperial sun shines, images of excessively rapid ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the unease which, despite the best efforts of art historians, much 17th-century painting in the grand manner produces in modern eyes may lie in perceptual as well as in cultural embarrassment. A laconic note from David Hockney prefaces Paul Joyce’s conversations with him. It ends: ‘My photographer friends said it ...”

“... worshipped at least one of its characters, the girl Candace, bluntly called the whole novel ‘a grand failure’. However, indulgence is the virtually unavoidable frailty of all scholarly biographers who live too long too closely with their subject, noting, spying, checking, watching, loving, quarrelling, confessing, agreeing for year after year; and this ...”

“... Revolution. Yet he remains curiously absent from popular memory, and from the academic curriculum. David Carpenter, long-time professor of medieval history at King’s College London, remembers that his tutor at Oxford jumped straight from John to Edward I and left out Henry III altogether. During his long labours on this massive two-volume ...”

“... properly, behind closed doors. Opera dress rehearsals seem slightly busier than the first night, grand and populous with all the members of the board on view. There are titled patrons and their ladies, and crowds of discreet functionaries discreetly function in an atmosphere of hushed reverence. This is Art with a capital S. The opera was well under way when ...”

“... removal of ruins and the burning of ancient marbles for lime. Other popes followed his example. As David Karmon showed some time ago, the movement to conserve ancient sites in their current state was born in the same years when antiquarians worried that Rome was consuming its own substance to fuel its revival.Susan Stewart’s The Ruins Lesson tells the story ...”