“... Grob, says ‘The Big Heat is finally Lang’s American pendant to the German Mabuse.’ And David Kalat, author of an excellent book on all the Mabuse incarnations, says that Debby, the character played by Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat, ‘is key to understanding Lang’s worldview, key to understanding the Mabuse genre’.Certainly The Big Heat offers ...”

“... The answer, Mead believed, was for people to design a personal culture. Twenty years later, David Riesman would credit Mead with having inspired him when he made a similar point in The Lonely Crowd: personal ‘autonomy’ was the solution to the conflict between tradition-based ‘inner-directedness’ and self-diffusing ‘other-directedness’. On ...”

“... and any number of ministers and favourites. In Mary Rose, his book about Brandon’s third wife, David Loades says: ‘He was present everywhere, but it is hard to pinpoint what he actually did.’ Throughout his career Charles accumulated grand-sounding titles, which confused outsiders into overestimating his importance ...”

“... and other pre-emptive acts of violence. Another neo-con, the New York Times columnist David Brooks, recently blasted the CIA’s ‘bloodless compilations of data by anonymous technicians’ and praised those analysts who make ‘novelistic judgments’ informed by ‘history, literature, philosophy and theology’. Rumsfeld’s war on the ...”

“... feeling at the damage caused by these policies was enough to force many politicians into making grand statements about Europe’s obligation to save lives, and even to consider opening borders or increase resettlement numbers. The Paris attacks supplied an excuse to start closing borders again, since it appeared that one or more of the perpetrators had ...”

“... in 1968, sculpted a riposte to the colonial-era statues that stake out the circumference of the grand rotunda – the least repentant part of Girault’s building. The curators had planned to remove them until the Flanders Heritage Agency decreed that they should stay put. Mpane’s New Breath or Burgeoning Congo (2018), a monumental latticed wooden ...”

“... 27 January André Gide, also in Algiers, was, according to his own account, checking out of the Grand Hôtel d’Orient when he saw the names ‘Oscar Wilde’ and ‘Alfred Douglas’ on the slate on which guests’ names were written. Theirs were at the bottom, which must have meant that they had only just arrived. His was at the top in one of his ...”

“... gives a spirited first-person account of changing agricultural conditions. ‘Agriculture is the grand product that supports the people,’ he wrote, ‘both public and private wealth can only arise from three sources, agriculture, manufactures and commerce … Agriculture much exceeds the others; it is even the foundation of the principal branches.’ But ...”

“... Dante, Boccaccio, More, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Bayle, Voltaire, Sterne, Diderot, David, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Warburg, Proust, Kracauer, Picasso and many more, each an extraordinary display of learning. No other living historian approaches the range of this erudition. Every page of Threads and Traces, his latest work to appear in ...”

“... has a discernible direction, and that nations must align themselves with it, is a relic of the grand historical narratives of the 19th and 20th centuries. Such views are no longer held by serious historians but continue to animate the pundits and politicians in Washington. Clinton often appeals to teleology in Hard Choices: she repeatedly recalls a speech ...”

“... fluency in English – with or without Juliet – but his library contained the works of ‘le grand William’ in both English and French. So the British reader had to wait another three decades – until 1886, six years after the author’s death – for the first published translation of Madame Bovary. It too was made by a woman, Eleanor Marx Aveling ...”

“... Bill the boilerman, in the hope that one day, after we’d been evicted and found ourselves in a grand mansion, she’d get it back, one photo that I looked at with wonder. My mother was sitting on some steps down to the sea in Monte Carlo or somewhere in the south of France. Walking down those steps to the sea was a man I’d only heard of from my ...”

“... on the mainland, and also unwilling to compete with other writers. His English biographer David Gilmour suspects that he was moved to write by his sense that as an ‘ultimate descendant of an ancient noble line whose economic and physical extinction culminated in himself’, he would be the last member of his family to have ‘vital memories’, or ...”

“... Bon Marché, named after Boucicaut’s Paris store although it was founded by a Londoner called David Lewis. Between 1920 and 1924 it was given an art deco makeover and was regarded as ‘one of the finest examples of modern architecture that Liverpool possesses’. There were also Owen Owen and Lewis’s, which catered for customers from the middle and ...”

“... form. Nor does it take the form of the boredom with self either – that great peerless theme of David Foster Wallace’s in his last book, The Pale King (2011).Q. Does anything happen in these books?A. Yes, but not where you think. Let’s first follow a certain consequence of itemisation to its conclusion. There are feelings and emotions in these volumes ...”