“... Cubists painted still lifes and a few portraits; even Picasso only occasionally took on the grand themes of war, history and morality.In the tradition that includes Sickert’s ‘room picture’, the focus had shifted from content to style by 1910. It was no longer a case of moral tales for the parlour, erotic pictures for the bedroom and devotional ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the landmarks of Marxian economic thinking include Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism (1972), David Harvey’s Limits to Capital (1982), Giovanni Arrighi’s Long 20th Century (1994) and Robert Brenner’s Economics of Global Turbulence (2006), all expressly concerned with the grinding tectonics and punctual quakes of capitalist crisis. Yet little trace ...”

“... a man with wild red hair (looking like Léonide Massine in The Red Shoes) who brings Livesey and David Niven tea in the country house where some amateurs are rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This house seems to be set on a series of steps which, though the film was shot in the studio, relates it to Hardwick Hall and also to the dream sequences that ...”

“... detail, procedure, priority or method.Quigley was alluding principally to the durable consensus on grand strategy, military alliance and trade, but his argument applies with equal force to the home front. Here, the Clintons only ever made one challenge to the status quo. Inspired by the obvious popularity and also the electoral potential of the idea, they ...”

“... to fabricate a first bomb,’ and eight or nine kilograms for subsequent ones. According to David Albright, one of the best and most reliable independent experts, ‘the most credible worst-case estimate’ is that the North may have between 6.3 and 8.5 kg of reprocessed plutonium. In other words, the CIA’s educated guess, endlessly repeated in the ...”

“... easy about Britten’s boys. Britten certainly fell in love with Piers Dunkerley, Bobby Rothman, David Spenser and David Hemmings (the youngest of them, and the one whose relations with Britten were ‘nearly catastrophic’, according to Pears). But these were chaste relationships. Hemmings later said that ‘there was no ...”

“... the artist,’ D.H. Lawrence wrote, ‘trust the tale.’ It must be his most famous aphorism – David Lodge even called it ‘a cardinal principle of modern hermeneutics’. It has proved especially popular with critics who want to deny authors the last word on their work. ‘What if a reader construes a poem in a way you felt you didn’t mean?’ an ...”

“... transformed when in Ulysses he composed a spoof list of names invited to the marriage of the grand high chief ranger of the Irish National Foresters, which includes ‘Mrs Barbara Lovebirch, Mrs Poll Ash, Mrs Holly Hazeleyes’ and other arborial frolics. As it lists and explores literary names, riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, this rich book seems ...”

“... Life! O Sun!’ Elsewhere Graves has the war inverting other myths: his version of ‘Goliath and David’ (‘For Lieut. David Thomas, 1st Batt. Royal Welch Fusiliers, killed at Fricourt, March 1916’) reverses the biblical tale of giant-killing: ‘“I’m hit! I’m killed!” young ...”

“... flourishes, and its crowning glories are the five volumes of the Poems edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins and published by Longman between 1995 and 2005. But the pleasures of scholarship are not wholly coextensive with those of reading. Students are probably still encouraged to enjoy the measured venom of the satires. But where to go beyond that? Paul ...”

“... the Black Dwarf.’ We had a vote, and everyone was in favour, which was rare – I think even David Mercer, who was the most grumpy attendant at these meetings. So that’s how it happened, and we raised money for a broadsheet, the first broadsheet on Mayday 1968, and people poured in with offers of help. When I think back on it, it was quite ...”