“... in a performance of ‘Buffalo Bill’s Wild West’. Julia’s illustrated programme for a ‘“Grand Concert” donné par Mlles Boit’ in 1891 suggests that they were also able to entertain themselves. But few such documents have survived. Hirshler has to fill out the picture by using the memoirs of Wharton, who was six years older than Florence and born ...”

“... to other governments, and as a covert instrument (and often scapegoat) of presidential grand strategy. But the CIA’s most important product, Hayden says, is truth: evidence meticulously gathered and arranged for presidential consumption. Hayden’s truth is the truth from John 8:32, which is carved into the marble wall of the lobby of the CIA’s ...”

“... who lived at Melbury House near Evershot, in west Dorset. Built in the 16th century, Melbury is a grand English country house with formal gardens, lakes and an extensive deer park. Lord Digby (1809-89) was Sir Edward St Vincent Digby, the earl’s son-in-law. Walton, the gamekeeper, was William Walton; according to the 1861 census, he was born around 1800 in ...”

“... law generally prevails over democratic discontent in spite of adverse electoral consequences. David Cameron must have looked on in envy: he’d tried to talk tough on immigration without any authority to reduce Britain’s openness to southern Europeans. Merkel meanwhile profited from continuing to talk up German openness while having ensured that Germany ...”

“... and its immobilisation in infrastructure – a ‘spatial fix’, in the words of the geographer David Harvey – is one progenitor of Xi’s grand initiative. China’s treatment by the US is another.In October 2011, Obama’s then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, announced the birth of ‘America’s Pacific ...”

“... dramatised, his master’s compositions. Rembrandt later returned to the subject, at least twice. David de Witt suggests in his catalogue essay that it wasn’t the subject, an exotic conversion story long interpreted in terms of the whitening of the soul by Christian baptism, that encouraged this flurry of painted renditions, so much as the pretext it gave ...”

“... natural tendency towards quietism and silence. In 1920, after a career lasting half a century, the Grand Old Man of English Letters writes to Alfred Noyes: ‘ “What a fool one must have been to write for such a public!” is the inevitable reflection at the end of one’s life.’ But there is, necessarily, more to Hardy than this, and he was always torn ...”

“... obliged to valorise his home-life and ordinary West of Scotland experience by dressing them up in grand language: the result is that his subject-matter is patronised by Literature, which bestows such poemy titles as ‘Thyestes in Ayrshire’ and ‘No Ultima Thule’. The Wee Malkies are replaced by the Visigoths, while sexual touch makes ‘pores bloom to ...”

“... he’d junk it or record it some other time. In the Eighties, though, he began experimenting with grand studio effects, nearly always to the detriment of the song concerned. A potentially excellent album like Empire Burlesque (1985) is almost ruined by disastrous over-production that includes disco-funk synthesisers, intrusive backing singers and overdubbed ...”

“... read too much into women’ and ‘loved his own ideas in them and never really felt grand passion’. All the same, he would have felt something. 1786 was a momentous year. In early September Goethe left secretly for Italy, sending Carl August a farewell note en route: ‘I am going in order to correct all kinds of defects and complete all kinds ...”

“... under whose sinister influence he falls. Through all this, Froberger gradually reveals to us his grand Promethean scheme to become ‘the Magellan of the face’, to capture the spectrum of facial variations (69 of them) and penetrate to some hidden order of truth. ‘I believe that if I can catch the exact gamut of all my expressive possibilities – then I ...”

“... with mink collars and cuffs; her 18-carat-gold belt was decorated with 50 carved emeralds from David Webb, one of the finest jewellers in America; her three-acre garden brimmed with the rarest orchids in Southern California, and her kitchen produced cuisine worthy of connoisseurs. In addition to a Los Angeles mansion in affluent Holmby Hills, the ...”

“... figures are not unresolved in this way, nor are Degas’s, or Moore’s come to that, or even David Smith’s. It can be argued that this lack of poise is a positive thing, part of Epstein’s style, but it seems probable that, at best, it will in the end be judged a provincialism, akin to Hogarth’s ramshackle perspective. Although Gardiner insists that ...”

“... of the famous loins with the parts blacked in ‘where it is good and sharp’. Yet despite the grand presentation of excess (Grainger’s letters, like Wagner’s, sometimes read as if they were instruction booklets on how to satisfy ultimate needs), the man behind it only rarely transcends the feelings of an overgrown brat. This is the famous Grainger in ...”

“... all the way back to the beginnings of the alliance. In other words, there was a worm in the bud. David Reynolds has characterised the origins of the relationship in an illuminating phrase: ‘competitive co-operation’. Alas for the British, the competition was an unequal one, a fact that Churchill himself began to realise during the last two years of the ...”