“... pearl’. When Bertie got cold feet, Albert angrily told him he was duty-bound to propose. The hope was that marriage might finally correct the weakness the tutors had failed to deal with. Given this upbringing, the question was not whether Bertie would rebel, but how. Soon after his exciting trip to Paris, he and his 11-year-old brother Affie were caught ...”

“... Art’s Sake’ endeared him to the upper-class connoisseur, wrote, apropos of a Barbizon painter, Charles-François Daubigny: ‘It is really too bad that he … should be satisfied with an impression and should neglect details to the extent that he does. His pictures are nothing more than rough drafts left in a very unfinished state.’ Thirty years ...”

“... as a Zouave when the war began, was killed in one of the several futile battles fought in the hope of breaking the Paris siege. He was 28. Renoir was conscripted and sent to the Pyrenees, where he got dysentery and nearly died. Monet, who had done a tour in the army in the early 1860s, was called up, but absconded to England. Zola stayed in Paris (he ...”

“... joined a group called Pat T. Cake and His Mighty Panthers. Soul music was coming into its own. Ray Charles was recording for Atlantic Records; Sam Cooke had left the Soul Stirrers; James Brown was touring with his Famous Flames. But Otis Redding wasn’t a soul singer yet. Billed as Otis ‘Rockin’ Redding or ‘Rockhouse Redding’, he sang rock and roll ...”

“... He returned to Beijing in 1974, and worked in a factory. He wrote furiously, even – like Charles Olson – on the walls of his room. He hated the city, ‘those small light-filled boxes, the crucibles in which age-old humanity is melted down.’ He thought of himself as an insect, ‘pinned to a board with its legs dancing’. But he fell in with a ...”

“... of politics likely to have appealed to the most heroic figure in Irish life and literature since Charles Stewart Parnell: politics, that is, proposing a parade of rascality, hilarity, treachery, hypocrisy, audacity, idealism, always shot through by moments of splendid courage and always ending in bitter tears? If Dear Reader will allow me to vanish for three ...”

“... Chávez represents never dies. It is the immortal ideal of the revolution’s humanistic hope.’Adducing as evidence his sympathy for Latin American strongmen or his youthful membership of a Trotskyist organisation notorious for its undemocratic methods, Mélenchon’s adversaries charge him with authoritarian tendencies. Last May two centre-left ...”

“... out of big business, to rest at the English country home of an American friend. The friend was one Charles de Forest, another Grotonian. At the house, ‘Fuzzy’ met Charles’s sister Alice. They eventually returned together to America, and married in May 1929. By this time ‘Fuzzy’ was already seeing John ...”

“... clear. Watergate fans will recognise the old cast of characters, those almost-forgotten names – Charles Colson, David Young, Egil ‘Bud’ Krogh – and there is pleasure in this: a bit like watching an old horror film on late-night TV. Yet on that level Mr Hersh is not exciting. We know the Watergate story from every angle and, by now, from the memoirs of ...”

“... That Friday, when the announcer said the Agreement had been signed, I felt a sort of cold hope: I remembered Sunningdale, the Loyalist Workers’ Strike, the collapse of the Power-Sharing Executive in 1974. At seven that evening, we reached the house of the friend we were staying with on Lough Swilly. Looking at the hail sweeping down the darkening ...”

“... to a know-nothing government in Westminster. The Sydney Herald warned off Gipps with a reminder of Charles I’s fate. Somewhere in all this an independent Australian nation was evolving, but at what cost? Gipps was forced to condone the whitewashing of the Waterloo Creek massacre. The remaining suspects in the Myall Creek massacre got off. The Governor’s ...”

“... to him to show some interest in ‘the man’ who was struggling with his wife, to express some hope that the Police might apprehend him in the next few days, or to add some detail about the incredible circumstances – anything to prove his innocence and keep in touch with his children. It needed only a couple of words. But he can’t tell the story. A ...”

“... metropolis with corruption. Even Spanish theorists, Pagden points out, came to argue that the only hope for their Empire lay in economic reform. By the end of the 18th century, all three empires stressed commerce and were ‘overwhelmingly concerned with undoing the deleterious consequences of the “spirit of conquest” and the military ethos of ...”

“... material. Respectable (if more sedate) life as historical documents, to be studied in the hope that the informed mind will be able to persuade them to flutter with their old vivacity. Painting apart, she is clearly interesting, from our point of view, as a woman who was successful in a male profession. Her contemporaries were kinder than critics are ...”

“... from the Merit of that Title) has degraded himself to offer Freedoms to his poor Servant!’ ‘I hope I shall always know my place’ is Pamela’s dictum as a servant, but like Jane Eyre she also has an angry sense of the obligations of a ‘gentleman’ and a refusal to be much impressed by the fine ‘ladies’ she meets. (The truculence and resentment ...”