“... where such things are more likely to occur. (Two modern editions of the Requiem – those of David Wulstan and Bruno Turner – try to correct the offending octaves in the Benedictus but in doing so introduce two sets of consecutive fifths. It would have been better to leave Victoria with his momentary slip, as Rees does in his new online edition of the ...”

“... ruthlessness in those pursuits. The Oxford first in History, accomplished with the guidance of David Hogarth, later a senior archaeological colleague, then a fellow officer, included a study of Crusader castles done in the field, which involved an examination of the Syrian citadel, Krak des Chevaliers, then little-known in Britain. This suggests ...”

“... to be put through antic paces. In such poems I am reminded of Hamburger’s friends, Edwin Muir, David Gascoyne, Vernon Watkins and Robert Francis, poets whose common styles share the knowledge of what words have gone through. What such knowledge proposes is patience, certainly not the petulance in which Hamburger indulges himself when the bad humour takes ...”

“... vituperation was sustained by, among others, a retired member of the Burmese Civil Service named David Alec Wilson, who sent forth a six-volume corrective to Froude which Kaplan rightly calls ‘a historical grotesquerie, a mass of undigested and unevaluated documentation whose main purpose was to prove that Carlyle was a saint and Froude a liar’. It took ...”

“... heir. By the time he was being lined up as Mary’s husband, he had completed a three-year grand tour of his father’s territories, and had already been married and widowed. His father negotiated his new marriage contract without telling him. Politically, the match had a great deal to recommend it. The other European superpower of the 16th ...”

“... 1970s from the confluence of the Iranian revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Camp David Accords and the 1979 siege of Makkah. Like al-Qaida before it, IS sought the eventual destruction of the Saudi monarchy. But IS and the Sauds have things in common. Both were determined to act against apostasy and heresy; both insisted on the dangers of ...”

“... 1968. He won the Prix Goncourt in 1978 for Rue des boutiques obscures, and in 1996 was awarded the Grand Prix National des Lettres for his work as a whole. He has become the object of a modestly growing academic industry. I take the quotations from Modiano with which I began (and a couple of later ones) from Alan Morris’s sensible book Patrick ...”

“... and give highly exaggerated accounts of Muslim antisemitism and collaboration (the Palestinian grand mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, figures prominently here, as he does in Netanyahu’s speeches). While immigration has provoked widespread anger in Germany and helped foster the rise of the far-right AfD, the presence ...”

“... poets to play the role of politicians; it was they who had formulated demands and programmes. His grand quarrel with the idée reçue of Poland was thus, in particular, a quarrel with the romantic poets. Norwid rejected their exaltation of the national question into an absolute, their insistence on the priority of the collective – the nation – over the ...”

“... best architect alive in England’. There continues to be a great deal of motoring to luncheon at grand houses. The Second World War saw the requisitioning of stately homes, the introduction of heavy taxation and the disappearance of domestic service. But the National Trust’s Country Houses Scheme made only modest progress because owners were unable or ...”

“... have heard’). ‘Barbara,’ Edmund Wilson decided, ‘is really a bad lot’: so bad that when David Pryce-Jones came to write his memoir of Connolly he thought it best to say nothing about her at all. On the other hand, it is part both of her disobliging character and its attraction that in compiling her own memoirs she does nothing to minimise her ...”

“... perhaps doubted whether the more serious charge would hold up. The trials of Robert Watt and David Downie, which revealed parallel plots for insurrection in London, Edinburgh and Dublin, set a more direct precedent. They were the first trials for high treason to take place in Scotland since the 1351 statute had become law there. The Government took its ...”

“... art can make and the support it can give to bad government are evident in Bell’s treatment of David (‘this cheerleader-cum-weathervane’) and the Death of Marat. He tracks its ‘terse, glare-lit, blocked-off pictorial space’ back to Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi, and the genre, the martyr-portrait, to religious art: ‘...”

“... Murray’s engagement with two perspectives on reality – does truth lie in granular detail or a grand design? – and which of these to promote in his books.The preoccupation among postwar novelists and theorists with representing reality was in part a reaction against modernist attempts to make the novel closed and total. In 1965, Frank Kermode, writing as ...”

“... for years. It is the story of a fearless leader surrounded by shadowy forces and intrigue, of grand conspiracies to thwart the will of the people who elected him. A narrative in which Mr Trump, even before a gunman tried to take his life, was already a martyr.History often starts with a photo. The transfer from digital capture to T-shirt might take less ...”