“... and statues of the Fonte Gaia, the municipal fountain that originally stood opposite the town hall in Siena. Although neither San Petronio nor the Fonte Gaia reflects much interest in the antique Roman architecture, ornament and figure style that so absorbed leading Florentine sculptors at the time, the tomb chest on which the effigy of Ilaria lies is ...”

“... on the meaning of his story are always sensible. Joseph Lanza despises intellectuals and has no more interest in being sensible than he has a talent for it. Elevator Music, subtitled ‘A Surreal History of Muzak Easy Listening and other Moodsong’, is a dotty book, a tireless and tiring panegyric to musical trash, a history which is surreal only in the ...”

“... since last year marked the 250th anniversary of his death, he is guaranteed to feature on every hall and church programme. There is also a vast outpouring of Bach recordings, which, until DGG curtailed the series, included John Eliot Gardiner’s amazing cantata performances. One of these took place every week for a year ...”

“... subsidies to private sector electricity generators (especially wind and solar farms), but have no enthusiasm for public ownership. Britain’s political class remains unified in its belief that energy infrastructure must be owned by the private sector. Since privatisation in the 1980s, successive leaders have rejected any suggestion of ...”

“... began by aborting Constitutional change and is ending in a state of Constitutional rigor mortis. John Major’s Government contemplates no political evolution whatever on the mainland, as distinct from in Ireland, and advertises this rigidity as ‘defence of the Union’. When it founders, however, such intransigence will ...”

“... have made an early medieval monarch proud, and given the long history of dispute over Alsace, no doubt similar conditions frequently did just that. To rule over an abundance of tongues and laws showed that you were more than just a local ruler: an increase in diversity signalled an increase in power. More lands meant an increase in the number of potential ...”

“... people are rare, business insolvencies are high and a very large number of people have no qualifications. Four in every ten jobs are in the public sector – the NHS, local government and education. People die younger here than in almost any other place in the UK. It’s a story people who live here know well: in the national media it is always the ...”

“... was being sued, on the ground that Queen Victoria, like all her predecessors since 1689, had had no title to the throne. The argument, which would have wiped the statute book almost clean, was dismissed without much ceremony; but in 1688 and 1689 it occupied the centre of the political and constitutional stage. Could a hereditary monarch, either by violating ...”

“... doesn’t think with much penetration about its subject but doesn’t interfere with it either, no flashy stuff. Wendy Pollard’s record of Johnson’s life is scrupulous; she sticks to the diaries and the letters and the work, and her admiration for her subject and enthusiasm for Johnson’s writing is unflagging. By the end of the book the enthusiasm ...”

“... both Tsarist and Soviet, puts everything else in the shade: between 1901 and 1966 there were no fewer than seven different multi-volume ‘Collected Works’ published in Russian. In the interwar years, he was more than a literary celebrity: he was an international guru, dispensing his own brand of scientific optimism and preaching the need for a world ...”

“... brought out of storage after the war, they were reinstated in the north-west corner of the Front Hall, where the present gift shop stands. This was not the end of Amaravati’s vicissitudes. By the Fifties, humidity and pollution had again started to erode the marbles. They were packed away and stored in the museum’s basement in atmospherically controlled ...”

“... primarily for the great annual public exhibitions and some of them exclusively for these, with no appropriate final destination. Special shows of one or two works of art, usually large ones, were also to be seen in Paris, although less often than in London, where the American artist Copley exhibited his Death of Chatham and his Death of Major Peirson in ...”

“... his house don’t seem to mind. Esteban might plead in mitigation that his wife, the pure Clara, no longer sleeps with him, preferring to cuddle up with his sister. Clara is an unusual sort of woman: she is a clairvoyant, surrounded by female spiritualists, and she made her mark as a little girl by shouting ‘fucked’ in church, during the priest’s ...”

“... 2000, a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Still the archive remained sealed, nikomu ne vydavat’ – not to be seen by anyone without the written approval of the Prokofiev estate. The only papers to have been released are Prokofiev’s diaries for the years 1907 to 1933. Svyatoslav published them in Russian in 2002, reconstructing them from his ...”

“... for the wider struggle; she writes approvingly of egalitarian marriages, such as that of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, but is less interested in – perhaps even a little suspicious of – women who were sexually free or who publicly challenged gender roles. She skates over the divisions in the movement, and rather than predict possible ...”