“... King reports here, is the only surviving 18th-century African artefact associated with slavery. David Dabydeen has pointed out that the very word ‘patron’ could at this point mean both connoisseur and slave-owner. It would be intriguing to know whether the peculiar interest which Sloane had in tobacco and its paraphernalia was connected with his other ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... essay Wolfgang Kemp gives special attention to the highly controversial frame that Caspar David Friedrich designed for his Cross in the Mountains. It consists of a gothic arch composed of palm fronds, and a predella decorated with wheat, a vine and a diagrammatic eye. In 1808 Friedrich exhibited the painting in this frame in his studio before sending ...”

“... no new taxes’ Bush, and Bill ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’ Clinton. David Schippers, the majority counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, hammered home the point in the course of his peroration during last winter’s impeachment proceedings: ‘The President, then, has lied under oath in a civil deposition, lied under oath in a ...”

“... insatiable curiosity. General histories with argumentative themes are often more accessible than grand pseudo-objective tomes, and this one makes very clear what it is knocking down. It doesn’t have the confusing omniscience which is to be found, for example, in the brilliant work of Norman Davies’s own tutor at Oxford, A.J.P. Taylor, or give the reader ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for his papers, and writing them up in long series of articles. He drank, and cultivated a casual grand manner. To an accompanying hack he claimed to be writing for ‘posterity’, and when an angry wire from Frankfurt came along, had to endure his friend’s sarcastic inquiry: ‘Was that posterity?’ His observations were often acute: at a Social ...”

“... of discussion, and there were intermittent episodes of excitement around a Watteau, Greuze or David. When an artist had something revelatory to say, when he found ways to represent previously latent perceptions and structures of feeling, an audience was ready to respond. But in the absence of such exceptional art, the business of painting and sculpture ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... out of nothing, not for their own prosperity but for the imagined future of their children and grand-children? When the legal barriers are lifted and the violence suppressed, some sort of hope may return, opportunities may open up, and after a generation or two there may be some success stories. But the situation is not as it was before the injustice or as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Layard wrote of Piero’s frescos in the choir of S. Francesco in Arezzo that the figures were ‘grand and noble’; there was ‘consummate power’ in his depiction of human emotion, and novel effects of ‘perspective, foreshortening and chiaroscuro’ abounded. Above all, in Sansepolcro there was the fresco of the Resurrection – ‘No painter has ever ...”

“... on 120, crossing from California to Nevada at some point along the way, then a stretch along the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, Route 6, over to the small town of Basalt, another hundred or so miles up to 50. At first the country was high enough that it was green, beautiful and stark and treeless, until the altitude climbed a little into piñon-pine and ...”