“... but also to educate them in new musical trends, and major works by Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Richard Strauss were premiered at the Proms before the First World War. But in the beginning, Wood’s programmes were much less demanding, often consisting of many short items, so as not to bore the audience. This was especially true of the early final ...”

“... rivers, and employing vast amounts of slave labour in gigantic public works projects (the Great Wall). The despot above and the cringing mass below prevented the emergence of anything resembling a modern middle class. Karl Wittfogel, the leading ideologue of the German Communist Party in the early 1930s, was the leading proponent of this theory. He went to ...”

“... for families to sleep in, survive on sufferance. Most stand in a state of near destruction, a wall down here, doors falling from hinges there, prisoners shaved for execution. Posterity can lay the blame on Syria’s modern rulers: the French, who between 1920 and 1946 cleared acres of labyrinthine quarters to make room for cannon and tanks to control the ...”

“... an eye, And fly-leaf ballads on the vendor’s string, And broad-edge bold-print posters by the wall. He took such cognisance of men and things, If any beat a horse, you felt he saw; If any cursed a woman, he took note.That manages to be heroic and quotidian at the same time, describing at once a vocation in life and a stroll about town: how brilliantly ...”

“... the best picture The Taking of Christ on loan from Dublin, a superb painting but hung on the same wall as the National Gallery’s Supper at Emmaus. This is nowhere near as good because the central figures don’t compare. In the Dublin picture Christ with his downcast eyes is ascetic and noble (with Judas yearning and troubled). In the NG’s picture ...”

“... the ones that penetrated the hull, were by intellectual formidables such as the critic and editor Richard Poirier, who methodically dismantled Bellow in this paper (after a patronising observation from Atlas about Bellow’s unsure footing when he ventures into ‘the realm of ideas’, Poirier dryly commented: ‘Atlas himself occasionally ventures into the ...”

“... A few years later, in his late twenties and now at Harvard, he found himself watching the Berlin Wall come down and wondering what it meant, for the world and for him. ‘I had written in my journal deep into the night, my brain bursting with urgent, half-formed thoughts, uncertain of what my role might be in this great global struggle but knowing even then ...”

“... one side of the display room we proceeded, dutifully examining the fly-blown war photos on the wall. They got worse as you went along. Battlefield shots first – mudslides, craters, collapsing limbers and dead horses – then a switch to British and German wounded laid out in hospital beds. The photographer, ‘Ferdinand of Ypres’, had signed each ...”

“... outlook in 25 years. He has already seen off Schröder’s attempt to install a wan version of Richard Branson as Minister of the Economy, and shaken the composure of the Bundesbank. The direction of the Government, of course, will not be set by the SPD leadership alone. The rules of any German coalition give significant leverage to the lesser partner. The ...”

“... become a tourist site. It seems incredible to me that the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the World Trade towers will be perceived as some sort of golden age – albeit one characterised by the production of disaster movies ranging from the Gulf War to Pearl Harbor. After several days of uncertainty, the US President found his ...”

“... that wants to be and can be your friends,’ he told the Colonial Office. Some, like the Labour MP Richard Crossman, were sceptical. Crossman accused Ben-Gurion, ‘the dictator who runs the Jews in Palestine, including the illegal army’, of playing a ‘double game’. The reason for the double game was that the Haganah wasn’t yet ready to defend the ...”

“... single neon light, a dozen people, each with a laminated card around his neck, are sitting along a wall. These are the domestic observers from the different political parties in the North and the South. In front of them, on a blue plastic sheet, is the pile of ballots, emptied from the ballot box. A yellow-vested official picks them up one by one, unfolds ...”

“... Archaeological Museum says. The couple were illustrious knights of the royal chamber of Richard II, Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, ‘the Castor and Pollux of the Lollard movement’, as the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane called them. Neville died just four days after Clanvowe, the inscription records, in October 1391. The ...”

“... in the face of popular protest, a sequence of events symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall. This was, for Thatcher, a moment of apotheosis and the culmination of a decades long struggle against the enemies of human freedom. But she could take little lasting pleasure in it. It immediately raised in her mind another, perhaps even more deep-seated ...”