“... Some of us who are neither historians nor political scientists have by chance become aware, as was John Adams at the time, that what happened in the US between 1776 and 1783 was so demonstrably different from what happened in France ten or twelve years later, that to call them both ‘revolutions’ is merely obfuscating. Professor Hill, every inch a ...”

“... the self-appointed guardians of the Rose and the Globe Theatres claim to be preserving. One of the major charges levelled by the Puritans against the playhouses of Shakespeare’s day was that they were involved in and encouraged idolatory: the worship of graven images. The appalling spectacle of famous actors and actresses praying over heaps of bricks and ...”

“... or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem’ was a recipe for failure. In July 1964, however, he was asked by John McNaughton, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, to join him in the Pentagon as his special assistant. The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had given McNaughton responsibility for co-ordinating strategy towards ...”

“... happened in January while reading about May, though it’s an oddity that the reader is given one major piece of information (about the termination of a pregnancy) that Mungo never discovers. A one-way imbalance of knowledge between reader and character can lend a narrative urgency but when the imbalance goes both ways the result is likely to be ...”

“... the fights he picks are too one-sided. It is true that he likes to point out that in each of his major wars (Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq) he stayed the course when the doubters were writing his political obituary. But it was in each case just his obituary they were writing, and just a political one; the killing remained almost entirely the killing of unknowns ...”

“... signature – was born in the parish of St George, Canterbury, in February 1564. He was the son of John Marlowe, shoemaker, and Katherine née Arthur, a Dover woman. They had nine children, though only five survived childhood. Christopher was the eldest son, and after the death of his sister Mary in 1568, the eldest child in the family. His father was ...”

“... place of the Widener collection). Antique sculpture, perhaps surprisingly, was never given a major part in this story, though classical architecture certainly was. Duveen’s favourite architect, John Russell Pope, supplied a mausoleum for the Huntingtons, adapted Frick’s townhouse as a public gallery and designed ...”

“... until the last half of this, the third game. A bit like not bothering to vote for Jospin say I. John was watching the game in a local French café called Gastro. On the final whistle he commiserated with the owner. ‘Of course,’ shrugged M. le Patron, in a what-do-you-expect way, ‘most of the team play in England.’ Superb. The Irish record in World ...”

“... As Louis MacNeice lay dying in 1963, his last major work, a radio play called Persons from Porlock, was broadcast by the BBC. It is about a painter called Hank, who starts well in the 1930s, but whose development, as MacNeice explains in a note, ‘is interrupted by the war . . . Subsequent interruptions and frustrations include those occasioned by the lure of commercial art, by drink, money troubles and women ...”

“... or relapsed into anonymous existence. We follow to Auschwitz Sophia Levinton, a Jewish doctor, a major in the Medical Corps, captured at Stalingrad, because she happens to be a friend of Yevgenia Shaposhnikova. The latter’s brother-in-law Viktor, an atomic physicist, the most important but least realised character in the novel, is there to make the painful ...”

“... in by Carl André, while Samuel Beckett endlessly redistributes 16 stones among four pockets, and John Cage copies a star-atlas onto music paper. In the messier room across the hall, Karlheinz Stockhausen untunes a synthesiser, while William Burroughs randomly folds and cuts up his prose, and Robert Rauschenberg pushes a stuffed goat through an old tyre. That ...”

“... actor. Carole Lombard, who had worked with Fredric March, Charles Laughton, William Powell and John Barrymore, thought him more remarkable than any of them. On screen, his name appeared as James Stewart, and he worked hard at every detail. He was a canny businessman. Before the Second World War, he invested in a small airline. Soon after the war, taking ...”

“... Today, six years after New York’s financial crisis was precipitated by the refusal of the major New York City banks to underwrite one of the City’s routine bond issues, New York’s prospects seem healthier, and the lessons to be learned from its fiscal tightrope act seem more appropriate for less developed countries struggling with international ...”

“... and, through their persistent and popular hostility to ‘Kulturbolschewismus’, culturally. The major centrist thinkers – Mann, Max Weber, Walther Rathenau, none of them instinctive democrats, but urged on by fear of the gun-happy right – managed to justify a democratic republic as the necessary successor to an unrestorable Reich. So, of course, did the ...”

“... When John Wesley visited Bath in 1739 to inveigh against the follies that flourished at hot springs, he was challenged by a fleshy, domineering figure in a white beaver hat, who demanded to know by what authority he was preaching. Wesley’s retort (or so he claimed) was ‘Pray, sir, are you a justice of the peace, or the mayor of this city? By what authority do you ask me these things?’ Richard (‘Beau’) Nash was at a loss for a ready reply ...”