“... received their definition, two lesser known but more rewarding essays on Central Italian and North Italian art, as well as the major work on Florentine drawings. It had been his 40-page pamphlet on an exhibition of Venetian paintings held in London in 1895, mowing down their grandiose attributions (especially the multiplying Giorgiones) with a critical ...”

“... power in 1933, it quickly established a Ministry for National Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels, who set about establishing control over the BBC’s German equivalent, the ReichsRundfunkGesellschaft (RRG), and put into production a cheap radio, the ‘people’s receiver’ – broadcasting’s equivalent of the Volkswagen. Radio, according ...”

“... On 11 August 1942 Joseph Bursztyn, a doctor in the French Resistance, was executed as a hostage in reprisal for Resistance attacks on German troops occupying Paris. The previous month his wife had been arrested by the Vichy police and deported to the German death camps. Their small daughter, Claire, who was saved by neighbours, this summer saw Maurice Papon, who was responsible for her mother’s deportation, released after less than three years in prison ...”

“... in the company of a steady companion called Hucks, picturesquely intent on a walking tour of North Wales. Their route took them through Oxford, where they looked up one of Coleridge’s old schoolmates, who took the visitors to see a notorious democrat at Balliol called Robert Southey. It was an encounter that, Southey would recall, ‘fixed the future ...”

“... himself as a ‘typical masochist’ who relishes his ability to endure pressure, Danchenko quoted Joseph Brodsky and Eduard Limonov, invoked the Russian international relations scholar Alexei Bogaturov, recited the lyrics to a song by Grazhdanskaya Oborona, the USSR’s first psychedelic punk band, and riffed on Chomsky’s notion of universal ...”

“... created by Stalin as a new Jewish homeland and located in the far east of Siberia, on the north bank of the Amur River. Established in May 1934, Birobidzhan was supposed to provide a shining alternative to Palestine, Yiddish-speaking and playing a positive part in the construction of socialism. Supported largely by fund-raising abroad – especially ...”

“... state; from which it follows that the discourse of that Church – Gibbon’s critics (other than Joseph Priestley) were nearly all Anglican clergy – must be taken seriously, as argument from known premises dealing with problems known to arise from those premises. It may further follow that chapters 15 and 16 of the Decline and Fall can be considered as ...”

“... her husband’s house. She then opened a school and established a household in Newington Green in North London to support this now helpless and homeless sister, taking in not just Eliza but her younger sister Everina and her delicate friend Fanny Blood as well, whose marriage to her dilatory suitor Hugh Skeys Wollstonecraft meanwhile actively promoted in the ...”

“... his initiative sapped by handouts from the state’, or the ‘young unmarried mothers’ Keith Joseph had fretted about in 1974, threatening ‘the balance of our population, our human stock’?‘Neither Keynesianism nor monetarism win votes in the electoral marketplace,’ Hall went on. But Thatcherism had ‘found a powerful means of popularising the ...”

“... For three hours cries of anguish were heard like some vast choir singing a death song.’ Joseph Conrad wrote with a ‘certain bitterness’ shortly after the night of 14-15 April 1912 about the ‘good press’ the story was receiving. The white spaces and big lettering of newspapers had, he thought, ‘an incongruously festive air’, with ‘a ...”

“... is right’ marches and the grind of time which reduces every labour myth to dust, Maxwell Joseph acquired the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane. The brewery – with its stables, cellars, cooperage, cobbled yards – acted, along with the Spitalfields fruit and veg market and Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, as a buffer-reef against the encroachment ...”

“... sharing the enthusiasm of Sarkozy, who was eager to reassert French imperial prerogatives in North Africa. The Franco-American friendship began with a mishap. Walking up the stairs of the Elysée palace, Clinton stepped out of her shoe; Sarkozy ‘gracefully took my hand and helped me regain my footing’. She sent him a photo of the incident ...”

“... off Long Island. The charts were often dodgy too. The Scillies were placed fifteen miles too far north, which contributed to the wreck of Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s squadron. I fear that The Coasting Pilot, published by Mount and Page of Tower Hill throughout the 18th century, probably deserves some of the blame, although my ancestors may have partially ...”

“... her life.’ The lack is necessarily unassuageable. Unconsciously drawn to Witold as to her true north, she experiences a repeated rhythm of half-formulated expectation and subsequent disappointment in him.Their union is the crux of the story, the point to which it tends as under the pull of a magnet. The crisis occurs two-thirds of the way ...”

“... had been built in the late 17th century by a ‘pugnacious evangelist and hot-gospeller’ called Joseph Billio, said to have been the inspiration of the phrase ‘fighting like billy-o’. And so this seasoned travel writer goes on, boarding country buses and peering out of the window as England struggles by. After reviewing the Essex coastline, he enters ...”