“... 14 October, Yves Threard, the deputy editor of Le Figaro, said on the television debate show Le Grand Soir that he ‘hates the Muslim religion’ and once got off a bus because there was a veiled woman on it.On the same day, the president of the centre-right party Les Républicains, Christian Jacob, said: ‘It shocks me that we accept that a veiled person ...”

“... more sinister slipped into the mix, how were they to know? Barry Bonds later admitted before a grand jury that he had ingested a substance supplied to him by Conte by placing a couple of drops under his tongue – the prescribed method for ingesting an undetectable steroid – but only because he was under the impression that it was flaxseed oil. Conte’s ...”

“... collection. It is one of those works of art whose extreme poignancy is partly due to their being grand but dilapidated and thus both sad in mood and rich in connotation. Another allegedly Vulcian work, wonderful this time for its preciosity, is a pair of votive boots in terracotta, about 16 cm high (cat. 182). There’s a pair of early Chinese bronze animal ...”

“... seem, available elsewhere and the sources for which are not stated. It includes a list of the Grand Masters of the Temple: for reasons they give, the authors are convinced that this list is fuller and more accurate than any hitherto known. Because they had found this list convincing, the authors turned their attention to another list which at first they ...”

“... there is an interesting meeting of minds between Goldcrest’s favourite producers and directors (David Puttnam, Richard Attenborough, Hugh Hudson, Roland Joffe, John Boorman) and its financial supporters. Shadowing the whole business, of course, is the dubious issue of the revival of the British film industry, for which Goldcrest had to bear all the hopes ...”

“... orations such as he offered after the Tucson shootings in 2011 have marked episodic returns to the grand style, but when you hear those speeches you wonder what office he thinks he occupies, and in what country. The dignified and commanding presentation suits a theatrical impulse that lies deep in Obama’s idea of his proper powers – an impulse he has ...”

“... Actors don’t lodge in the culture as once they did,’ David Thomson writes in the entry on Heath Ledger in the latest edition of his Biographical Dictionary of Film. ‘They are a type of celebrity now.’ He contrasts Ledger, who died three years ago at the age of 28, with James Dean, who died 55 years ago at the age of 24 and became the standard against which all young, handsome, would-be acting geniuses in Hollywood are measured ...”

“... refit, the art is everywhere, part of the texture of the house. A Brancusi head sits on top of a grand piano; a Ben Nicholson hangs at knee height under a window; the attic is devoted to Gaudier-Brzeska sketches. While the house was being repainted and a few repairs carried out, the curators used the time to restore some of the collection. Ede’s approach ...”

“... A young Englishman of means passing through Rome on the Grand Tour in the mid to late 1700s might well have been directed to the studio of Pompeo Batoni to have his portrait painted. It would probably only have taken a couple of sessions for Batoni to get the sitter’s face onto canvas – the 12 he gave David Garrick were unusual ...”

“... The vast David Hockney show at the Royal Academy (until 9 April) is deliberately overwhelming. What it most looks like is an overblown, hyped-up, hyperreal parody of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, that super-English annual gathering of the amateur art establishment, to which the buying public with large pocketbooks flock from the Home Counties and beyond ...”

“... only art to which a poet with a nostalgia for those times past, when poets could write in the grand manner all by themselves, can still contribute, provided he will take the pains to learn the métier and is lucky enough to find a composer he can believe in’. Paul Muldoon, who ranks with Auden as a poet for whom the intricacies of verse and rhyme are ...”

“... David Fincher’s The Social Network, which tells the story of Facebook, is fast and intelligent and mean, a sort of screwball comedy without the laughs. It’s written by Aaron Sorkin, whose credits include The West Wing and A Few Good Men, and based on a novelised history by Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires ...”

“... seat of government in the Piazza della Signoria, he stopped in front of Michelangelo’s 15-foot David. He didn’t see in it a symbol of the Florentine nation or even identify the figure. For the abbé, it was ‘a great phantasm of white marble, well worked and all of one piece’ (‘ung grand fantosme de marbre ...”

“... husbands, painting before an audience was a means of demonstrating autonomy. In May 1664, Cosimo, Grand Prince of Tuscany, joined the visitors who packed into Elisabetta Sirani’s studio in Bologna to watch her paint a breastfeeding scene. Having established the first secular art school for girls after inheriting her father’s studio, Sirani had a lot to ...”

“... Street and the Rue de Rivoli, merely underlined the fact that the British were amateurs in the grand manner. The city whose ‘towers, domes, theatres and temples’ Wordsworth celebrated in the rare moment of urban empathy, was more candidly described in The Prelude as a ‘monstrous ant-hill’, ‘gloomy’ and ‘unsightly’. Like the making and ...”