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“... of thought; sometimes, like Asia in Prometheus Unbound, he believed that Prometheus ‘gave man speech, and speech created thought.’ Shelley’s idealism asserted the constitutive power of language; his scepticism noted not only the habit by which a Thou congeals into an It but the fact that the triumphs of poetry are but partial and fleeting. This ...”

“... we have not seen the emergence of Trumpist oligarchs. What we do see are Trumpist enablers, the Paul Ryans and Mitch McConnells who have been happy to push through deregulation measures and massive tax cuts for the upper echelons. These enablers have set about realising Steve Bannon’s goal of ‘deconstructing the administrative state’, in effect ...”

“... which were used to cover a gap in the telegraph network between Brussels and Aachen, giving Paul Reuter a monopoly over all telegraph traffic between Belgium and Germany. The five sons of Mayer Amschel Rothschild used pigeons to stay in touch as they travelled around Europe consolidating their father’s banking dynasty. During the Siege of Paris in ...”

“... finished. When Mies drew her attention to the excellence of his chief draftsman, she sat in the man’s office for hours practising mechanical drawing after persuading him to give her lessons. ‘I took my drawing board and T-square with me when I travelled, even to Paris,’ she writes.Lambert’s account is so engaging not only because it is the story of ...”

“... on Bond Street introduced time into the vision of souls, bliss, beauty: Hirst’s objets de vertu were ephemeral, and fell to the ground after their short span was done. They invert the usual definition of art as eternal, countering time and decay. The words tempus and temple share the same root; the connection suggests that the function of a sacred ...”

“... considers the careers of ten who made their names in the decade. By 1950 change was coming. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published in English in 1953. There were increasing opportunities for women who were bold and determined enough to take them. Yet for all Cooke’s justified satisfaction in finding so many possible subjects from which to make ...”

“... In​ 1984 Guillaume Dustan drafted a personal ad: ‘In brief: young man, eighteen, hypokhâgne, Lycée Henri-IV, short brown hair, 1.7 metres, part preppy, part 1950s greaser, not very sporty – sensual – funny, neither a party animal nor a bookworm. Now let’s see if the feeling is mutual …’ Written when he still went by the name William Baranès, it anticipates the Guillaume Dustan to come: the pointed mention of his prestigious schooling; the importance of cultivating ‘a look’ (often imported from America); the fear of being consigned to a particular identity or sphere (either the nightclub or the library) that might foreclose some as yet unknown experience ...”

“... a Lady Chatterley-ish story of a woman, Eva, who flees an unhappy marriage with a wealthy older man, and falls in love with a young engineer called Adam. Machaty had planned a close-up of the heroine’s face as Adam kisses her and wanted the audience to be in no doubt that she had indeed reached a state of ‘ecstasy’, in Eden, with her Adam. The trouble ...”

“... years between them, one with an older woman, Margaret and Ivan, and one with the more usual older man, Peter and Naomi; a filial and a quasi-filial pair, Peter and Ivan, and Ivan and Sylvia; and one age-matched couple, Peter and Sylvia. Across expected lines of sympathy and understanding, new groupings form, and each makes at least one unexpected gesture ...”

“... party’s 2019 slogan, ‘Get Brexit Done’; the former Vote Leave director of communications, Paul Stephenson; and Ben Guerin, one half of Topham Guerin, the political consultancy firm that rebranded the Conservatives’ official Twitter account as a fact-checking service during a pre-election debate.*Johnson, the group agreed, needed a simple message ...”

“... native, the unpalatable facts would soon become obvious. In such a system, he wrote, ‘the white man’s superiority, the basis of every colonial regime, is undermined.’ Eritrea toiled on under Italian administration into the glory days of Fascism. In 1930, eight years after the March on Rome, Ras Tafari was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, and ...”

“... Le Festival de Cannes​ was inaugurated in 1939 to coincide with – and compete with – the Venice Film Festival. The previous year, Leni Riefenstahl had been awarded the Mussolini Cup for Olympia, leading the American representative on the jury to leave the ceremony in protest. Cannes was chosen in the hope that the festival would revive its appeal as a luxury destination, which had floundered after the Great Depression (in this respect the festival has been largely successful ...”

“... spirit and an alter ego through whom, you could say, he re-created himself. His Cavafy – the man’s bespectacled face, his world, his city, his life, his sound, his gestus – constituted a double translation of the poetry, into the portable art of etching via an English version of the original Greek text. The Tate, which owns a set of the prints, says ...”

“... with no binding ties to France (‘we have one prime and essential need: our dignity’). De Gaulle warned Guineans that a strike of this kind against French influence would be a Pyrrhic victory and when Sékou Touré’s cause prevailed, France was as good as its word. On the eve of independence, as an estimated three thousand French nationals ...”

“... at Stratford the curtain rose with Antony on his knees pleasuring the Egyptian queen of Frances de la Tour. Even the jaded eyebrows of Stratford went up a bit at this and just before it transferred to the Barbican Alan rang and began without preamble: ‘I’m sure you will be relieved to learn that for our London debut the director has elbowed the ...”