“... however true the collector’s expressed admiration, is always going to be unstable. The collector may or may not have the best eye, but he certainly has the best money. He then becomes a person who owns and displays the artist’s work, and perhaps donates it to the nation – or has it confiscated by the nation. At which ...”

“... from a dignified letter written by the artist Mary Kessell, it makes painful reading. Clark may have worried about these broken hearts and dashed hopes, but if so the evidence seems to have vanished.A major source for Stourton is Clark’s letters to Janet Stone, wife of the wood engraver Lawrence Stone, kept under embargo in the Bodleian but available ...”

“... public debate about Occupy’s tactics). The greatest achievement of the post-Occupy conversation may be the unexpected success of Bernie Sanders. Running in a Democratic primary ran counter to the basic ideas of OWS, and at first Sanders wasn’t identified with the movement. By all accounts, he expected to run a protest campaign, a shoestring operation that ...”

“... courtroom, but the case that really launches his narrative is that of James Hadfield, who on 15 May 1800 was arrested in the Drury Lane Theatre after firing a pistol at George III as he was blowing a kiss to his subjects from the royal box. There was no question that Hadfield had acted with deadly intent. He had loaded his pistols carefully and aimed like ...”

“... in Essex, left his oxen long enough to walk the Pilgrims’ Way to Santiago de Compostela. He may also have visited Italy, and on his return he had an otherworld vision unique of its kind. The star attraction of his hell was a vast theatre managed by demons for their own amusement, in which the damned compulsively re-enacted their sins before being torn ...”

“... It was​ the weirdest election of my lifetime. Theresa May, with the largest Conservative share of the national vote since Margaret Thatcher’s post-Falklands triumph in 1983, failed to secure a majority, while Jeremy Corbyn – reviled by most of his own MPs – made Labour competitive again, with a remarkable near 10 per cent swing in his favour ...”

“... makes clear, the cliché of the Victorians as sexually ignorant and repressed is misguided. They may have thought differently about sex from their grandchildren but they didn’t think about it less, and in 1858, after the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act came into effect on 1 January, they thought and talked about it a great deal. Divorce in England had ...”

“... population is draining away and the area is too cut off to be supplied militarily. The​ YPG may not have fought to the end for Afrin, but they will certainly fight if Turkish forces move further east to attack Manbij or the Kurdish towns and cities close to the Turkish border. Erdoğan promises a broader offensive to stamp out ‘terrorists’ in the ...”

“... university philosophy departments was such that, as Eastman recalled, ‘rays of his influence may have helped to mould me long before I heard of him.’ The guiding principle of the philosophical approach William James defined as ‘pragmatism’ was that ideas and beliefs are not inherently true, or right, but are made so by their practical ...”

“... Cortés’s bloodthirsty captain responsible for the massacre of Aztecs in the Templo Mayor on 22 May 1520, during their celebration of the Feast of Toxcatl.In October 1990, Octavio and Marie-José and a group of Mexican writers, including me, were in New York for the monumental exhibition Mexico: Thirty Centuries of Splendour at the Metropolitan Museum of ...”

“... uses the phrase in a more nuanced way. His subtitle points to the fact that while Harold Godwinson may have been ‘the last English king’ (actually he was half-Danish), and possibly the ‘last of the Saxon kings’ (though that is just Bulwer-Lytton deflecting the shame of defeat away from England), unlike his predecessor, Edward the Confessor, he had no ...”

“... that, along with the regretted scholastic exchanges, passionate love letters went up in smoke. It may simply have been more about those bears.This isn’t the only bonfire to have made Wade’s task more difficult. When the economic historian Eileen Power died in 1940, her sisters burned most of her personal papers. It is impossible to know whether this was a ...”

“... inasmuch as with hardly an exception his pictures are atrociously hung & lighted’. ‘It may be said as a general thing that you never see the Tintoret,’ he wrote in an essay of 1882. ‘The churches of Venice are rich in pictures, and many a masterpiece lurks in the unaccommodating gloom of side-chapels and sacristies … some of them ...”

“... a fictional sequel or addendum, An Episode of Flatland, which wasn’t published until 1907. He may have anticipated being considered ‘not so much a heretic as an afterthought’.Hinton starts at a relatively late point in its protagonist’s life, with a number of his books already published and the disgrace of the court case in the past, as his family ...”

“... on board the Bahraini-flagged MV Aman, at anchor in the Gulf of Suez. Aisha had been hired in May 2017 as the Aman’s first mate. The ship was owned by a Bahraini company called Tylos Shipping and Marine Services, and operated by a crew of sixteen men from Egypt, India and Syria. According to an ITF report, the Aman was arrested in November 2017 (under ...”