“... lunching and drinking) when she joined the agency in the 1970s. Perhaps they really were masters of disguise. Or, more likely, they were just saying what the wiser heads in the British government wanted to hear, committed as they were to decolonisation, ill able to afford many more costly counter-insurgencies like Malaya and Kenya, and only too ...”

“... discomforts of the working class – ‘are more annoyed by hardships and rough living than their masters.’ It was far more ‘agreeable and advantageous’ to hire a local, so long as no antiquarian knowledge was expected, let alone trusted if offered. For that, (hand)books were the thing. It is hard to imagine that this advice was followed to the ...”

“... and Mies were bourgeois professionals, while Meyer was a communist. The artists designated ‘masters’ at the Bauhaus, such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer, were no less diverse, as were the few women who rose to prominence through the workshops. That rise was rare in art schools of the time; today, however, the textiles of Anni ...”

“... Córdoba had often practised circumcision and avoided pork, in imitation of their Muslim masters. The Sephardim who left Spain in 1492 rather than convert were still extraordinarily conscious of their Spanish identity, and sought to impose the Castilian language (in the form of Ladino or Judco-Spanish) on the communities among whom they settled along ...”

“... thirties. He wasn’t experimental, at least not in the beguiling fashion of the far better known John Ashbery, who combines the exaltation of Wallace Stevens with the shrugging insouciance of Frank O’Hara in order to come up with poems as expressive and as inscrutable as Reverdy’s. If Merrill was experimental, then it was in the way Bach played with ...”

“... to bolster the movie’s plot – the future Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, Archbishop John Hughes and the showman P.T. Barnum – are either transported backwards in time or engage in alliances with gangs that defy the actual marginality of these gangs within the class and power structure of the mid-century city. As for Gangs of New York’s ...”

“... says, he learned painting from a certain ‘Jean-Babeuf Audubon’, presumably a near relative of John James Audubon. On returning to England, he ‘lived the life of a rat’ for twenty years; he was eventually arrested in Bristol, accused of forgery and transported to Van Diemen’s Land. After causing maximum offence with a series of satirical paintings ...”

“... In the movie, however, it provides the occasion for one of Hollywood’s happy endings, in which John Quincy Adams moves the Supreme Court to a recognition of human rights by eloquently invoking the Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately, this never happened. The justices did, indeed, send the Africans home, but their decision turned on maritime law and ...”

“... that gave it independence. It is thirty years since Western Sahara was overrun by a new set of masters and, despite prolonged attention from the UN, there is no resolution in sight. The key to the difficulty lies in the suggestion that Western Sahara and therefore the Sahrawis are ‘really’ Moroccan by virtue of a history that predates the settling of ...”

“... of the Court. By the mid-13th century – that is, virtually from the start – the regent masters or dons of their day reached out for royal favour in an effort to free themselves from the jurisdiction of the bishop and diocese of Lincoln. Papal recognition was next sought and gained, but in all subsequent periods Oxford was far more inclined to ...”

“... too little and too lately known,’ Dryden wrote in a pompous, self-serving poem prefixed to John Oldham’s Remains in Verse and Prose (1684). Oldham had died of smallpox the previous December, at the age of 30, at the house of the Earl of Kingston, a young nobleman who had recently become his patron. He left behind a large body of work, now available ...”

“... of the expedition’s other climbers were British, as was its finance, and its leader, Colonel John Hunt (now Baron Hunt of Lanfair Waterdine and a Knight of the Garter) was on secondment from the British Army. On descending, Ed Hillary, as he is universally known, shouted to his fellow New Zealander George Lowe, another climber of great ...”

“... depicted the postcolonial black ruling class as swindlers in league with Western neo-imperialist masters, doing peasants and workers out of their land and rights. The theatre was burned down and Ngugi was imprisoned for a year without charge or trial, which convinced him he had been onto something by composing and staging a play in an indigenous ...”

“... Was Hugh MacDiarmid a great poet? Was he, as John MacQueen asserts in his Foreword to Catherine Kerrigan’s study, one of ‘the three greatest poets to use English in the 20th century’, the other two being Yeats and Eliot? One can understand MacQueen putting the matter that way, but perhaps it is not the most helpful way when the reputations of Eliot and Yeats are shaking down, in the ordinary process of time, following their immense acclaim ...”

“... a singular ability not to be distracted by the art he didn’t need in order to make his own. His masters were Chardin and Corot; he admired Uccello; his favourite painter was Grünewald – and that was mainly it, for Western art. He hated the Mona Lisa as many did, for its symbolic ascendancy. On a visit to Italy, he declared that he had ‘had it up to ...”