“... the distance that Banville possessed in his books and his reviews, the Olympian, Nabokovian grand view. I wished I was French or English. I hated the arguments. I always saw both sides and then could see above the whole thing, see how inevitable the mess had become, once that vast plain in the south of England, those huge fertile fields, began to ...”

“... We learn a great deal about his visual passions, for the 17th-century Dutch painters, for Caspar David Friedrich (Two Men Contemplating the Moon was part of the inspiration for Waiting for Godot) and, supremely, Cézanne (a late self-portrait attracted the quintessentially Beckettian description ‘overwhelmingly sad. A blind broken old man’). Cronin, on ...”

“... waited until two years after it was safely built before using it as a sound-stage for his Ich bin grand-standing. Hersh adds some more detail here, showing that Berlin was always subordinate to the sick Kennedy obsession with Cuba. Actually, almost everything became subordinate to that obsession. Again, we knew some of this already. In his book The Kennedy ...”

“... the operation that remained, there was almost no first-hand reporting. One freelance journalist, David Divine, made three trips in a small boat that was rescuing British troops, and the Royal Navy took a Pathé newsreel reporter-cum-cameraman; otherwise the BBC (and British newspapers) relied on the Ministry of Information. The consequences were a mixture of ...”

“... a centre-right coalition with the FDP. For three of her four governments, Merkel has relied on a grand coalition with the SPD. The impact on the SPD has been deeply ambiguous. On the one hand, except for the interlude of 2009-13, the SPD has been in government in Berlin for 21 years continuously. On the other hand the loss of identity, already visible under ...”

“... 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 ...”