“... no new taxes’ Bush, and Bill ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’ Clinton. David Schippers, the majority counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, hammered home the point in the course of his peroration during last winter’s impeachment proceedings: ‘The President, then, has lied under oath in a civil deposition, lied under oath in a ...”

“... C.R.W. Nevinson fancied the life of a bohemian and attention-grabber. His idol was Augustus John, king of the Café Royal, and, in 1908, he decided to go to the Slade, as John had done. There he knocked around with Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth in the Slade Coster Gang. They went to music halls, held parties with naked dancing girls and ...”

“... opposition, an elegant William Pitt rides the shoulders of the bloated-looking, nonsense-spouting King. John Bull, objecting to war with Revolutionary France in the 1798 ‘TREASON!!!’, farts into the unmistakably unhappy face of His Royal Highness. Like other caricaturists in the orbit of the French Revolution, Newton made scatology a subversive ...”

“... his foe, and ran the drama happily through in his mind. A few weeks later the newsreels showed King Alexander of Yugoslavia being mown down by a Croatian assassin on exactly that spot. ‘I felt oddly guilty, but also pleased. In the Mediterranean sunshine there were strange and violent men with whom I could identify, and with whom, in a way, I was now in ...”

“... on doing so. These fictions have the elliptical urgency of notes to an intimate; they can also, as David Garnett complained in a letter quoted by Barbera and McBrien, become ‘an impenetrable dossier of private day-dreams’. Some of the incidents and arguments of her novels are treated more cogently in poems. Some of them might have been better not treated ...”

“... because of their substantial remittances by no means uninfluential characters. They were loyal to king and country, and pined to be like father. Thus they damped down tendencies towards independence, encouraged complacency (and contributed to an officer cadre that would willingly follow orders at places singled out for the slaughter of colonials such as ...”

“... aristocratic vanity and waste, a provocative topic in the year following the execution of the King and Queen of France. ‘Knight was never generous in his polemics,’ says Penny, in the introductory Brief Life which is invariably too brief on such matters, ‘and this, combined with his apparent admiration for disordered nature, led some to react ...”

“... from the picture then Panofsky’s arch will overbalance and the critic with it. To suggest, as David Solkin does in his conclusion, that Joseph Wright’s An Experiment on the Bird in the Air Pump can ‘offer us a timely word of warning, before we join the chorus of acclamation for those market forces we see marching in apparent triumph across the world ...”

“... there has been a tendency to find the key to the universe in the curl of a teenager’s lip, in David Bowie’s lipstick or Janis Joplin’s hair. The shapings of history, the contours of time and place, are to be found in the stirrings of drum and guitar; or, deep as dimples, high as a quiff, on the heads of King and ...”

“... for displays of cultural superiority. Campaigning against decadent Asiatics in Turkey, the Spartan king got his prisoners of war to remove their luxurious clothes, revealing underneath the pale, abundant flesh that luxury had produced. He then put them on exhibition to show his soldiers both how much wealth was available and how little their effeminate victims ...”

“... its publication out of his own pocket, and who prepared a précis for personal presentation to the King – one of the earliest scientific soundbites. ‘But for him, in all human probability’, wrote Augustus de Morgan in the mid-19th century, the Principia ‘would not have been thought of, nor when thought of written, nor when written printed’. Halley ...”

“... to play fifty years ago) were also billed, alongside veterans from the founding festival: Santana, David Crosby, Country Joe McDonald, the remains of the Grateful Dead, Canned Heat and others. But Lang’s fifty-up began to unravel when his top-dog investor, the Japanese digicoms company Dentsu Aegis, announced from its London HQ that it was pulling ...”

“... small ways, that the trouble with Texas is the trouble with America. Faith, he tells us, is king. ‘No church captured the spirit of Tulia,’ he writes, ‘like the Church of Christ . . . the intolerance of the Church of Christ is legendary.’ Anti-gay, anti-welfare, anti-urban, this Christian sect is setting the agenda for America, as it set the ...”

“... often repeated tic: Yakimov’s wearyingly reiterated obsession with food and drink; the diplomat David Boyd’s snigger-cum-snuffle. The high-budget TV version brought the best out of the books. Alan Plater’s adroit screenplay, though it runs for six hours, removed almost all repetitions and longueurs. More, it gave interpretative shape to what, though not ...”

“... of the Prussian Order of the Black Eagle, which was stamped onto the coins issued by the first king of Prussia; the phrase was also used as the title of a Bach cantata of 1715. As MacGregor points out, the motto with its varying uses raises the central question of modern German history: how could such a noble ideal be perverted? The exhibition doesn’t ...”