“... early 1980s, Ismail Merchant set out to make The Deceivers. He was without his usual collaborator, James Ivory, who was not enthusiastic about the project. The film eventually appeared in 1988, and was met by a near unanimous lack of critical acclaim. The screenplay was based on a novel by John Masters (1914-83), who had served in the British army in India ...”

“... In 1598 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were forced to dismantle James Burbage’s Theatre in Shoreditch, which they had occupied since their foundation in 1594, so they transported it across the Thames and built their own playhouse on the Bankside. This was the building whose 20th-century replica was christened ‘Shakespeare’s Globe ...”

“... early films, from Red River to Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity (1953), and then, after Edward Dmytryk’s Raintree County (1957), eight late films from Vincent Donehue’s Lonelyhearts (1958) to Raoul Lévy’s The Defector (1966), the caesura provided by the spectacular car crash that wrecked his face. There are three kinds of classic American ...”

“... it was usually the hulking bombers from Habaniya that restored things to their grumpy normal,’ James Morris wrote in The Hashemite Kings (1959). At the same time, Britain had established a native Army with British and former Ottoman officers to supplement the RAF in controlling opposition to the new order. The goal was to protect both oil production and ...”

“... to his studio with a snapshot of this young Galway woman who (he said) had eloped with his son James to Paris some eighteen years before. Mossy agreed to copy the photograph in oils, two feet by 18 inches, unframed, for the usual flat rate of five quid, ten bob down, the rest on delivery, asked the usual questions, colour of hair, auburn, colour of ...”

“... A decade-long resuscitation began with the 1960 reissue of his collaborative effort with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which galvanised a new generation of social idealists and photographers. Then came the reissue of his book American Photography in 1962; a MoMA exhibition, in 1966, of subway photographs he’d taken in the 1930s and ...”

“... flight of the mind takes him to famous poems like Paradise Lost, once famous poems such as Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742-45), and less familiar works such as Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination (1744). He ends with a chapter on Baroque painted ceilings.Celestial ascent at death is an ancient idea. In its earliest known ...”

“... like a bewigged Nigel Lawson, arrested for all time at the moment of incipient eructation. James Winn says: ‘His short, squat figure later led his enemies to call him “Poet Squab”, and the plump birdlike face in this picture justifies the nickname.’ When Rochester, about 1675 or 1676, called him by that name, perhaps for the first time, in his ...”

“... more radically terrifying precedents for the development of the infant American Republic, and Edward Genêt, France’s first minister to the United States, began to enlist Americans in the work of spreading revolution in Europe, American thinkers and writers came to react against the world they themselves had turned upside down. They did this, according ...”

“... Last October James Rogan, a Republican congressman from California, and manager of the impeachment campaign against Clinton, faced the prospect of a tight re-election battle. His district had been targeted by the Democrats. Crucial to the outcome was the largest concentration of Armenian Americans in the US. To garner their 23,000 votes, Rogan – whose only-ever excursion outside the country was a trip to Armenia – proposed a non-binding Congressional resolution condemning the genocide of 1915 ...”

“... cento that is Moby-Dick, there is a passage which might be interpreted as Melville’s response to James Barry’s 1776 engraving The Phoenix or the Resurrection of Freedom. In the engraving Andrew Marvell is depicted with Milton, Locke and Algernon Sidney among the mourners at the bier of Britain’s traditional liberties. Across a pond the mourners can see a ...”

“... almost everyone had access to a radio, though not in the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall and St James, where they were banned, or in the Palace of Westminster, where MPs needed to gather around an MP’s car parked outside if they wanted to hear a horse race or a cup tie. Under the Presbyterian influence of its first director general, Lord Reith, until 1938 ...”

“... Edward Said​ was no tree-hugger. Descended from traders, artisans and professionals, he once described himself as ‘an extreme case of an urban Palestinian whose relationship to the land is basically metaphorical’.* In After the Last Sky, his meditation on the photographs of Jean Mohr, he explored the most intimate aspects of Palestinian lives, from hospitality to sports to home décor ...”

“... Albert held a bal costumé at Windsor in 1842, soon after they were married, and appeared as Edward III and his consort, Philippa of Hainault. They were painted in full medieval splendour by Edwin Landseer. The tradition later influenced society photographers – Madame Yevonde, Cecil Beaton – who encouraged fantasy play-acting in their ...”

“... was already there. But when it came to the Underground, London did reach out, to the countryside. Edward Watkin, who became chairman of the Metropolitan in 1872, drove the Underground overground for 35 miles, to Aylesbury, in order to further his ambition to build mainline railways linking England and France through a Channel tunnel. He failed in that, but ...”