“... children, but it set him up for a life of ever greater derangement and a dreadful end. Schumann may not have been insane, but he was certainly odd. His taciturnity was bafflingly extreme. He would let people talk on at embarrassing length before responding with a blunt or irrelevant few words. With the garrulous, self-absorbed Wagner, he ‘stayed as good ...”

“... affair. One of the reasons for this apparent willingness to subordinate her own career for so long may be that Hillary Clinton seems by instinct to be more of an administrator, an enabler and a mobiliser than a politician who is driven by a distinctive policy agenda. The criticism most often levelled against her by pundits and voters in America is that she is ...”

“... is very different from your image of the person you’re conversing with. Your interlocutor may produce universal smiles and universal frowns, and they may help you to identify with him emotionally, but he also has a particular nose and particular skin and particular hair that continually remind you that he’s an ...”

“... Curll, the Royalist Bishop of Winchester before the city fell to Cromwell in 1645. The truth may have been more prosaic, but like much else Curll’s background remains obscure. The main source for his early life is a malevolent biography by an unidentified ‘J.H.’, which offers copious back-handed praise (he ‘shew’d an early Inclination to ...”

“... a collection of thousands of eye-witness accounts covering five hundred years of performance. It may be taken either as an erudite coffee-table book or a major research tool, saving countless hours of fractured looking on the internet; either way, it is full of diverting detail. In 1707, Thomas Brown wrote that some of the singing men at St Paul’s ...”

“... Catholic priests, bringing hundreds to trial for alleged paedophilia. Some of these accusations may well have been based in fact, but many were not; the regime exploited them to secularise Catholic schools and close down many other lay institutions. Relations continued to deteriorate, and hundreds of German Catholic priests were imprisoned in concentration ...”

“... who understand what it is to labour at a definition.Those who prefer research methods to be buried may find Ogilvie’s habit of making explicit her archival travails frustrating, but it’s fascinating watching her track the contributors down. Her narrative ends as she travels back to Australia to meet Chris Collier, who merits the ‘unsung hero’ epithet ...”

“... outside, who requires a far bank from which to grasp his own city’s substance. The morning river may be still and the figures on its foreshore few, small and faceless, yet there is a zeal to the gunky highlights that stud the sunlit roofs, a kind of staccato fury.I turn from these notes of mine to the actual sentences with which Vermeer was first commended ...”

“... in part to affirmative action programmes in the 1920s, and the numbers in the Gulag contingent may proportionally have been even higher. Many of them wrote memoirs, mainly between the late 1980s and early 2000s, in which they generally told their stories in terms of a heroic struggle to care for patients, as their medical vocation required, despite the ...”

“... called ‘too slow’. Somnolent, smeary, subatomic, the first couple of times you hear it you may wonder, as with my early morning news report, if it wasn’t just a dream. Russell was a one-man index of all the tempos modern music might use or try out. He played in rock bands. He wrote and played experimental modern classical music. He was an ...”

“... to moor for three days, collecting fresh water and provisions. Muhammad Rabi’ noted that ‘one may find the same fruits here in the market as in India.’ The delegation then sailed for 47 days through stormy seas to Chinapatan (later Madras), on the Bay of Bengal. The port was at that time ‘rented’ by the British, who wined and dined the Iranian ...”

“... those who distrust government intervention and those who demand it. The effects of this crisis may yet end up being more severe than those of the last great crisis we faced, to which this one is often compared, the financial meltdown of 2008. But there is a similarity: then, as much as now, responses to the policy challenges were shaped by political ...”

“... failures on the machinations of Jews. As Luzzatto suggests, Morès’s antisemitic fervour may have been rooted in these humiliations, and in another, when his first choice of wife – Louise Fould, a wealthy Jewish heiress – rejected his advances.Could​ Morès be a distant forerunner of Donald Trump, another adept of provocation in new ...”

“... however, on his second term. Whatever optimism accompanied Labour’s return to office after the May 1929 election soon dissipated. MacDonald again had some diplomatic successes, but the economic outlook was ominous: unemployment rose relentlessly in 1930, reaching 2.75 million. MacDonald was willing to consider protectionist tariffs, but his cabinet ...”

“... ago over the proposal to replace the House of Lords by a Supreme Court for the United Kingdom may wonder not only why anyone should have opposed the move but how it was that the upper chamber of the legislature had become the country’s final court of appeal in the first place.At the dawn of the 21st century the UK’s system of final appeals was in most ...”