“... which Macdonald sets his scene, Brendel had published his History of Music in Italy, Germany and France, a work which already in this first of several editions promotes the idea of a strong progressive line in German music. Brendel identified a new tendency arising out of Beethoven, initially in the piano music of Schumann, and particularly ...”

“... than emphasise the physique, didn’t help. The fashion Henrietta Maria brought with her from France was for an amorphous shape with a loose-laced bodice – a departure from the tightly corseted, inverted triangular numbers favoured by the Tudors and Elizabethans. When Holbein drew Cecily Heron, Thomas More’s third and youngest daughter, during her ...”

“... living in Mallorca in the second. In the first she has escaped the round-ups of Jews in Occupied France, and kills herself in Milan much later. In the second she is not Jewish, and what she has survived is a raffish 1960s youth which involved, among other things, a little larceny and a little prostitution, and hanging out with Peter Rachman in London. The ...”

“... to be added to spore suspensions to stop them clumping when they are prepared and dried, but as David Henderson from Porton Down said in 1952, in a journal to be found in any medical school library, ‘fortunately many substances added to the suspension will prevent clumping. The simplest and most effective that has been found is sodium alginate used in ...”

“... chose to file a libel suit against Grunewald. What followed turned into the political trial of David Ben-Gurion and his party, to which Kastner belonged. Grunewald was acquitted. Kastner, the German-born judge wrote, ‘had sold his soul to the devil’. In Zertal’s view this was the beginning of Ben-Gurion’s downfall. Worn out by the scandal, he ...”

“... owners, nor the population at large, saw them as part of the national heritage. By comparison with France, Germany or Italy, Britain was slow to develop legislation to protect historic buildings and works of art. Most aristocrats were hostile to such intervention, repudiating the implication that they were imperfect custodians of their inheritance or that ...”

“... too close to it may in many cases be destructive. Circumstances must come in.’ In the 18th, David Hume believed that ‘parties from principle, especially abstract speculative principle’, were ‘perhaps the most extraordinary and unaccountable phenomenon’ that had yet appeared, and that ‘all general maxims in politics ought to be established with ...”

“... to issues of justice. He sought to apply to Paris the dictum from his Mémoires: ‘How rich France would become if it were well governed – above all well administered.’ Administration was for Haussmann fundamentally about forging the conditions of wealth and prosperity for the bourgeois order that had emerged victorious from the traumas of ...”

“... and to many charities. Her anti-Catholicism alone seems to have had no redeeming features. As France was both Latin and Catholic, the country was ‘nothing but a big brothel’. And when her youngest son, Jakie, decided to marry an Argentinian Roman Catholic, she refused to go to the wedding, stopping her husband going, too. Luckily, the young Chiquita ...”

“... Islam; Christian religiosity on the Western side; international difficulties (especially with France). Only time will tell whether one further aspect of this earlier imperial history repeats itself in our new protectorates: the way Britain was sucked into Egypt, so that a temporary occupation became a long-term and more overtly colonial one. Many ...”

“... says admiringly. Hundreds if not thousands of books came back across the Channel, of which (says David Dumville) maybe eleven can be identified. One of the books imported was an enormous Old Latin Bible from Cassiodorus’s Vivarium. It has not survived, but served as a format-model for the great Codex Amiatinus written at the twin foundations of ...”

“... and insofar as it was seen to be aiding Britain’s major enemy at the time – Napoleon’s France. If it was a war for anyone’s independence, it was for Canada’s: it started with an American invasion of that country – to ‘liberate’ it, naturally. (‘We will “conquer but to save”.’) So from the point of view of the Canadians, who ...”

“... few English women authors are known by name – among them Kempe, the 12th-century poet Marie de France and the sublime Julian of Norwich – others may lurk behind the anonymous female-voiced lyrics in Old and Middle English. Wellesley devotes a few intriguing pages to a 15th-century Welsh-language poet, Gwerful Mechain, whose diverse oeuvre ranges from ...”

“... his presciently titled book (Bush had not yet loosed his thunderbolt when the MS was completed), David Victor of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, calls it ‘the Kyoto fantasyland’, and in retrospect there was never a chance of a workable agreement. But the Kyoto delegates believed they had two precedents to hearten them. In 1985 Joe ...”

“... about Netanyahu’s predecessors, they had their fascination, from the monastic self-discipline of David Ben-Gurion to the gluttony of Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu comes across as a hollow figure: a ‘marketing man’, in the words of Max Hastings, who met him while writing a biography of his brother Jonathan. Yet Netanyahu can hardly be avoided, or his survival ...”