“... the one person Genghiz had feared and respected.) Kitbuga may have been inspired to try playing David at Goliath’s Spring: at any rate he attacked the Sultan (who inspired his own soldiers with the cry of ‘O Islam’) without the usual Mongol craft and precaution, and lost his army and his life. Had Hulagu been able to return he would certainly have ...”

“... Lord Mayor’s banquet at the Guildhall, a reception given by the Speaker of the House of Commons, grand dinners in great houses, even a Royal Garden Party. Of course, nowadays the home church hosts – the poor, buffeted, derided C of E – would have difficulty in laying on that kind of red carpet treatment, even if they wanted to. The phrase about ...”

“... sympathetic to Wagner and sent letters of recommendation on his behalf to the Director of the Grand Opera. Wagner soon discovered how little this really meant: hundreds of such letters were written by the French cultural élite about outsiders, who rarely succeeded in penetrating the charmed circle. By way of reaction, Wagner took as his model those ...”

“... from ‘toppling kings and unseating prime ministers’ as the foremost characteristic of his ‘grand strategy’. This is surely to rate a negative virtue too highly; and in any case to imply that such methods had been much more frequently resorted to in peacetime in the past than had in fact been the case. A more positive version would say that Bevin ...”

“... Sometimes he appears as a decent old buffer, a Victorian paternalist with faithful workers on his grand estate; but sometimes he poses as Mrs Dutt-Pauker, the wealthy Stalinist of Hampstead; then he may become a disturbed police officer struggling to control the fanclubs of Nerdley where all the housewives are violent supporters of different members of the ...”

“... of the cotton dealer’s office and portraits of his Italian relations record his visits to grand-paternal territories. Family matters were kept within the family: strong affection, decorum, financial disaster, and at least one first-class scandal (Degas’s brother was attacked by an angry husband on the steps of the Bourse, and returned blows with ...”

“... before he had been provoked either by libel or ‘sustained vilification’. It started at David Frost’s house in July 1975 when Frost (who told the story to Peter Jay) introduced Goldsmith to Wilson and Falkender. Since both Goldsmith and Wilson had, at different times, declared that the Eye was dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism and social ...”

“... having gone. Degas’s late work could not have existed without his immersion in the tradition of David and Ingres, neither could it have flourished within their shade. Kendall opens his catalogue with a remark made by Renoir: ‘If Degas had died at fifty, he would have been remembered as an excellent painter, no more: it is after his fiftieth year that his ...”

“... of flowers, smelling of faint rot’, and, terrifyingly, her eyes snap open to stare at her grand-daughter (disguised under the name of Tess) – At supper grandpère asks Tess the colour of grandmère’s eyes. Blue. Because grandpère’s eyes are blue. Comment! Forgotten so soon? And Tess weeps into the bouillon, the tears joining the small golden ...”

“... joined the web, you can’t leave.’In a 2008 interview for the Ballet Association, Scarlett told David Bain that he enjoyed his time at White Lodge ‘perhaps more than he should have’. He didn’t elaborate on what he meant by this. Scarlett won all the school’s choreographic prizes, and it was almost certainly this skill that gained him a place in the ...”

“... for Sinclair Lewis’s Dodsworth, whose industrial riches allowed him the Biedermeier carpet, the grand library of partly read books, the cabinet of sophisticated drinks and ‘the oak-framed fireplace with a Mary Cassatt portrait of children above it’.Cassatt lived for sixty years in France and is buried there; she was the second woman to show with the ...”

“... Before it was a classic film, Gone with the Wind was a classic PR stunt. The film’s producer, David O. Selznick, announced that he would launch a nationwide search for the young woman who would play Scarlett O’Hara. The move provoked a furore; Margaret Mitchell’s novel, published in 1936, was already a national bestseller – it seemed that everyone was reading it – and the desire to star in the movie version proved irresistible ...”

“... Copts on religious grounds.’ The accusation is that the British – the speech is addressed to David Mountolive, later to be his majesty’s ambassador to Egypt – have never understood any of this, and can’t tell one Arab from another. The person killed at the carnival was mistaken for Justine, and the person whose funeral we witness is Nessim’s ...”

“... from stylistic analysis. There is also the method of ‘too close reading’ wittily practised by David Miller, especially in his book Hidden Hitchcock (2016).Wolfson’s work is not unrelated to this last example – both writers are concerned with seeing apparitions and being glad to see them – but she tends to think that patient, uncensored curiosity ...”

“... the Birmingham Trojan Horse hoax.)In response to the Tower Hamlets case, the then prime minister, David Cameron, asked his ‘anti-corruption champion’, Eric Pickles, to look into electoral fraud. The subsequent report acknowledged its debt to Mawrey – ‘the judgment of Richard Mawrey QC was one of the reference points for this review,’ Pickles ...”