“... and accusations of the Revolutionary era to enjoy direct Hanoverian patronage from its Grand Masters, the Duke of Cumberland, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Sussex. Robison’s work triggered an immediate panic in New England, which supported the conservative Federalists against the rising tide of democracy. In his Fourth of July address in ...”

“... at the other end. In some cases, the analogy with slavery continued, and they ran away from their masters, even wearing iron collars. The book includes pages of advertisements for these breakers of contracts, and the descriptions remind us how common then were visible physical defects, pock marks, scars, stiff joints, brand marks, ill-healed fractures. In the ...”

“... and grey buildings, encased in pompous Doric pilasters, decorated in the mock-classicism which Roger Fry used to call pseudo-art. In Victorian museums, most of the ostentation was on the outside. As we all know, Charles Saatchi made his money in advertising. His museum is so discreet it is almost invisible, a giant hiding behind a row of tiny shops in a ...”

“... through language, but codes of behaviour were also written on the body. One reason dancing masters were so in demand in the 17th and 18th centuries was that they promised to teach deportment – the proper carriage of the body even after the music stopped. Some lapses from bodily decorum were permitted. Tears, for instance, might be acceptable – even ...”

“... and a harbinger of disorder. Surprisingly, there hasn’t been a full-length biography since Roger Lockyer’s in 1981, but the 400th anniversary of James I’s death next year has given Hughes-Hallett her opportunity. At more than six hundred pages, The Scapegoat is long, but Buckingham’s rise and fall is told in a succession of short, vivid ...”

“... in a couple of paragraphs and we are told that lack of evidence prevents us from assessing their masters’ treatment of them. This is just not on: Mr Leyser, for example, gives us an illuminating sketch of how lords ritualised their acts of charity to the poor to enhance their own power (though he understands that such acts were more than simply ...”

“... coincide with those of the post-colonial theoretical trendies one abhors. It’s rather as though Roger Scruton were to find himself seized by a passionate zest for the minor details of the Marxist-feminist critique of housework. God, Gulliver and Genocide is about ambiguity of motives – about those unstable mixtures of racism and anti-racism, collusion and ...”

“... classicist reactionary’. He disapproved of T.S. Eliot’s obscurity: ‘the practice of the masters showed,’ he claimed, ‘that the best poems had been written simply and comprehensibly about simple feelings and ideas.’ His first collection, Winter Movement, appeared in 1930 (like Auden’s Poems) and was made up largely of fairly traditional ...”

“... denotes a servant (which as a dog-lover who is aware of the autonomy of those in service to their masters I could never quite accept); snakes indicate, well, snakes; larger beasts tend to connote that their people are creatures of excitement and fear. According to one online test my own daemon is a scarlet macaw. According to another it is a wildcat, although ...”

“... Barnett Newman: not only pictorial unity and dramatic focus, but also ‘significant form’ (as Roger Fry and Clive Bell urged) and ‘the integrity of the picture plane’ (the vaunted ‘flatness’ demanded of Modernist painting by Clement Greenberg). Jasper Johns had played a similar trick with his paintings of flags, targets and numbers in the mid to ...”

“... Christ. Degas himself left these paintings unfinished and began to direct his attention to other masters, but Piero was not forgotten in France. Gustave Moreau claimed that Puvis de Chavannes had been in Italy with Degas in the late 1850s. There seems to be no other evidence that he visited the country after 1848 but he certainly had a close knowledge of the ...”

“... faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called on us; but we, the masters, were not at home. Even without the ‘nothing else’ this is a pretty hyperbolic proposition. With the ‘nothing else’ it turns into a form of madness, a suggestion that we shall not grow old at all unless we keep failing to receive the ...”

“... communist. I hadn’t known that this was McChrystal’s idea. He also told his officers to read Roger Trinquier’s Modern Warfare, a French counterinsurgency handbook designed for use in Algeria and famous for its advocacy of torture.McChrystal followed his memoir with three business self-help manuals, published at three-year intervals and copyrighted to ...”

“... especially, were very eccentric indeed. While still in place, covertly betraying their Eastern masters from Moscow or Warsaw, their information was thrifty and to the point. When they bolted to the West, which usually meant months spent at some guarded farmhouse in Virginia surrounded by crew-cut CIA interrogators of limited imagination, they rapidly ...”

“... and with increasing licence, the anti-masquers decked themselves in the attributes of venerable masters and indulged unrestrained for the shrieking crowd, throughout the night, the imitation of their quirks, their manners and their vices. Only at the University Gate, beyond the pitching fires of tapers and torches, did the crowd hush its cheering, and ...”