“... In​ the early 1960s, David Hockney made a series of etchings inspired by the poems of Constantine Cavafy; he went to Egypt to discover the places Cavafy had drunk coffee and picked up lovers, but in the images it’s mainly Hockney’s own life and friends who figure. The etchings touch on rapture, and the frankness of their erotic pleasure at the sight and memory of boys in bed brought Cavafy to a new, wide readership ...”

“... Pico was questioned by a papal commission, doubled down on his problematic theses and then fled to France, where he was imprisoned and narrowly escaped a heretic’s death. It was only by the grace of Lorenzo de’ Medici that he was allowed to return to Florence and take up a quieter life. But once Il Magnifico was dead and his son Piero was in charge ...”

“... stalemate of 1916 Germany was far nearer the end of its resources than Britain. Britain and France were always likely to be the last men standing. Inevitably, Lloyd George disliked and despised the generals and was always looking for ways to sack them, though, to be fair, he also had far more of a politician’s horror at the size of the casualty lists ...”

“... and early 21st centuries, agnostic clerics such as John Robinson, the author of Honest to God, David Jenkins, the controversial bishop of Durham, the Scots Episcopalian bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, and the Anglican atheist Don Cupitt belong more convincingly in liberal ranks than with authentic enemies of the Enlightenment on the Christian ...”

“... groundbreaking experiments were undertaken by Nikos Logothetis, working with Jeffrey Schall and David Leopold. It had been known since the 19th century that if quite different images are shown to each of your eyes at the same time, your conscious experience doesn’t blend the two but flips between them. If one of your eyes is shown a face and the other is ...”

“... Between them​ France and Britain had more than 450 million imperial subjects at the start of World War One. Germany, despite the geographical size of its African acquisitions, had fewer than 20 million. All three empires threw colonial manpower into the conflict, in Africa, Anatolia, the Middle East and Europe. In Britain, as in Germany, there was strong resistance to the idea of African contingents bearing arms on European soil ...”

“... boring Arsenal. Even when they won, they were losers.In 1989, while coaching Monaco, Wenger met David Dein, the Arsenal vice chairman. Wenger went to an Arsenal match and after the game shared a cigarette with a friend of Barbara Dein, David’s wife. He was invited to their house in Totteridge, North London, for supper ...”

“... where such things are more likely to occur. (Two modern editions of the Requiem – those of David Wulstan and Bruno Turner – try to correct the offending octaves in the Benedictus but in doing so introduce two sets of consecutive fifths. It would have been better to leave Victoria with his momentary slip, as Rees does in his new online edition of the ...”

“... He travelled – ironically for the dedicated Francophobe of the Syrian dispute – throughout France, first as brass-rubber, then as a student of fortifications, displaying a certain scholarly ruthlessness in those pursuits. The Oxford first in History, accomplished with the guidance of David Hogarth, later a senior ...”

“... the contorted oaks and blasted trunks of the great Romantic – and Christian – painter, Caspar David Friedrich, and the drawings of his lesser contemporaries such as the illustrator of fairy-tales, Moritz von Schwind. There are enigmatic cherubim lurking in the vegetation, and Poe-like ravens and other birds of ill omen in the branches; the sulphurous ...”

“... his closest to recent studies in the politics of literature by British literary historians such as David Norbrook and Jonathan Dollimore. These essays, which originated as lectures, are certainly dazzling performances. To historians like myself, what is most impressive about them is not the attention to historical context, which we have been trained to ...”

“... for military staffs to prepare war plans, or for governments to hint at the use of military force. David Spring shows that Russian leaders knew they had good political, financial, military and social reasons to avoid war, and that their hesitant moves towards army mobilisation were intended only to underscore a firm diplomatic stand, and to deter. The French ...”

“... with its stable marriages, television sets and cartons of milk. One thinks of Garrison Keillor, David Leavitt, and John Updike, whose most luminous descriptions are located in ‘the post-pill paradise’ of pleasure, estrangement and divorce. Thus the ‘normal’, whether a word, a category or a quality, loses its Larkinesque dullness and takes on an ...”

“... of course highly topical. The publication of Aristocrats has more or less coincided with that of David Cannadine’s Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain, which follows some of the themes of his earlier book, Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. Tillyard’s modishly-titled contribution is an enormous account of four ...”

“... and left-wing views. They can unite on racial issues, while differing sharply on others. In France, socialists and Communists have recently demonstrated that they can be as racist as anyone on the far right. And people in Britain who belong to racial minorities do not share a single set of left-wing views: they may all be opposed to racism, but they ...”