“... he puts in the second stitch, and my feet start to bang, I realise that he is the young sheikh in John Huston’s Beat the Devil. He, too, is ruthless and unsmiling, and finding Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Robert Morley cast up on his shores, plans to have them all shot. Bogart, however, discovers the sheikh’s soft spot, a secret passion for Rita ...”

“... have continued to be such gifted, if often recalcitrant, students, while appearing to the world as masters. Yet it would be a mistake to impose a dichotomy on Tagore’s work, between the modern, the political, the ‘critical’, on the one hand, and the romantic, the ahistorical, the organic, on the other, as two of the most intelligent critics of Bengali ...”

“... sense of how the vast network that linked the battlefield and the home front actually worked. John Bowne of the Washington bureau of the Sanitary Commission, busy with trying to match survivors with bodies at Gettysburg, took on the case of a domestic servant who wrote saying that she thought that she might be not a widow but an abandoned wife and asked ...”

“... the methods of shipbuilding and navigation. The manufacturing middle classes displaced the guild masters thanks to trade with the colonies and the Chinese and East Indian markets. This is one reason Marx says that ‘the weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.’ For the modern means of ...”

“... began to learn who he was, or at least who he was considered to be by the new political masters of Germany. Stern tells again the story of the expulsion of German Jews from the political, professional and cultural world they had done so much to build. More revealing is the unexpected story of continuity in small things. Yes, someone painted ...”

“... is currently facing’. Even before the winter began, Simon Stevens publicly warned his government masters that the entire system, not just emergency medicine, was teetering. Without an increase in funding, he said, five million people – almost every tenth citizen of England – would find themselves on a waiting list for an operation by 2021. (We’re not ...”

“... writes with a kind of working self-knowledge that brings him closer to the earlier and classic masters. His larger ‘artistic’ capacities, that is to say, can only be defined paradoxically as a larger and more coherent in-built revulsion from the ‘artistic’, or the artistic as licentiously self-defining. The evil forces in The Alteration are ...”

“... the great blow’ was Cézanne’s verdict in retrospect. ‘Monet and Pissarro, the two great masters, the only two.’) The Courbet, Manet and Delacroix in oneself, in other words – and no doubt the three remained heroes – would have to be painted out. Sometime in the winter of 1872-73 (I shall return to this later) Cézanne borrowed a landscape ...”

“... house building increased in the hopeful atmosphere of the budding welfare state, the builders’ masters voiced more ambitious aims. In 1946, Aneurin Bevan, minister for both health and housing, told Parliament that having the better-off catered for exclusively by speculative builders while the poor were set apart in council housing was wrong.You have ...”

“... and flexible reinterpretation in the light of contemporary developments. Jesuits were past-masters of such ‘accommodation’, and to be admired for it, whatever the scriptural accuracy of their treatments of Christian or other holy writ. But religion – in nominalist mood, he sometimes doubts whether the term has any constructive meaning at all ...”

“... my father, the Chinese Maritime Customs. But this work, much of it from the distinguished hand of John Fairbank, was mostly concerned with the 19th-century origins of the institution, shedding less light on modern times. For its more recent history, it was not even very clear where the records lay: the best contemporary guide to Chinese archives, produced in ...”

“... is not to themselves. Men are motivated by the need impressed upon them to collude with their masters in the upper castes, sustaining ‘manliness’ and keeping women ‘in their place’. (You can see this lesson or transaction taking place in beer advertisements in all our countries.) The Clarence Thomas hearings, when the public had to watch the ...”

“... in Scotland) and the second with one favoured by Uruguay (made in England). The Belgian referee, John Langenus (who, Wilson somehow resists adding, had failed his first refereeing exam when unable to answer the question ‘What is the correct procedure if the ball strikes a low-flying plane?’), was so concerned for his own safety that he arranged a ...”

“... from La Paz to view the body, and the famous photographs were taken – later compared by John Berger to Mantegna’s Dead Christ and Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson. That evening, when the journalists had gone, the two local doctors performed an autopsy, which showed beyond doubt that Guevara had been shot long after capture, though this only emerged ...”

“... went home to work on an assignment for a new course he was taking at the University of London, a masters in quantitative finance. Over the months I spent with him, I noticed that he loved the idea of heroism and was strongly attracted to creation myths. One of the first things he emailed me was a copy of one of his dissertations, ‘Gnarled Roots of a ...”