“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... their amp while digging around for the spare. In Memphis they drove around looking for something grand, as they imagined a recording studio to be, only to find ‘this sorry-ass storefront that looked more like a barbershop than anything else’. When they finally set up to record they plugged in the speaker and an appalling, pitiful sound came out of ...”

“... of her time at Cambridge that she got her own first ‘dusty answer’. She fell for the dashing David Keswick, who seemed so ‘very, very smitten’ that after one kiss she knew they would be together for ever. She was devastated when he explained he had been engaged to somebody else for years. She renounced love and made a short, disastrous marriage on ...”

“... was out of the question.But how to reach that ‘victorious conclusion’? In practice, British grand strategy was a blend of Micawberite waiting for something to turn up and one of the songs the Tommies had sung in the last war, ‘We’re ’ere because we’re ’ere because we’re ’ere,’ notably in the Mediterranean. The question of allies was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and victim, a virgin forever being interfered with by corrupt and powerful old men, a dewy David battling the thug Goliath. And people, the people apparently, have loved it. They love him being rich, having his own island in the sun, shaming the suits at board meetings, tieless in jumpers knitted by his auntie, getting drunk and randy, blowing millions ...”

“... be ‘miraculously crafted’ into a figure of romance. For Kerouac, who had been blocking-out a grand picaresque novel in his notebooks, an American Pilgrim’s Progress, this naked stranger held ‘the keys to America’, a kingdom whose magic had until this moment been withheld from him. Kerouac ‘glimpsed the possibility of romance’. There was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Waterside, the corporate headquarters of Marks & Spencer, in Paddington Basin (1993-); and the Grand Union Building, north of Paddington Basin (2000-). Still more projects are in the works. Most are fine buildings, cleanly designed and smartly engineered, each with a flourish of its own – the bridge entrance and the concave front of Channel 4, for ...”

“... aberration, England’s sole experience of open military rule since the Conquest. Their powers, David Hume ruled, were exercised ‘not in the legal manner of European nations, but according to the maxims of eastern tyranny’. Nineteenth-century Whiggish historians queued to condemn that ‘despotism’. That the sword reigned in Cromwellian England is ...”