“... frames with restlessly curvaceous surface, outline and section that were made in mid-18th-century France. Yet it could not be plausibly argued that these styles of frame evolved in response to the needs of particular styles of painting. The dark rectilinear frames reveal the same neat machined finish, techniques of veneering and exotic materials found in ...”

“... Perhaps in a sweetheart ‘democratic’ union prepared in advance by some Bulldog Drummond like David Hart.I read Milne’s book with a faint blush of shame because, not having paid daily attention to the strike and not having much liked Scargill when I met him. I had not disbelieved everything I read about the union funds. Furthermore, some of the bylines ...”

“... Whig, Sloane witnessed at first hand the military persecution of his co-religionists in southern France in the 1680s when studying medicine there, and by the end of that decade, already a Fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal College of Physicians, he was established as medical adviser to the new Governor of Britain’s slave colony in Jamaica. The ...”

“... the original SDP was incorrigibly Old Labour by Blairite standards. They have more time for David Owen’s later ‘tough love’ posture, though preferring what they call a ‘rounded’ blend of social market and community. Their explicit starting point is Thatcherism, their strategy to ‘move forward from where Margaret Thatcher left off’. Their ...”

“... the past 15 years. From the early Eighties, Western European socialist-led administrations – in France, Spain and Italy, then in Scandinavia – began to bend to the free-market gale blowing throughout the capitalist world. In Australasia, Labour governments, which were elected on traditional corporatist or social-democratic platforms, were quick to adopt ...”

“... dat animum (‘It is the holy love of the fatherland which moves us’). Half a century ago, Dom David Knowles, doyen of humane medievalism, hailed the MGH among the ‘great historical enterprises’, which it certainly was (and is) despite its original nationalist agenda. Medievalist Wissenschaft (the term has scientific connotations largely absent from ...”

“... unfinished and began to direct his attention to other masters, but Piero was not forgotten in France. Gustave Moreau claimed that Puvis de Chavannes had been in Italy with Degas in the late 1850s. There seems to be no other evidence that he visited the country after 1848 but he certainly had a close knowledge of the Arezzo frescos, and Piero’s influence ...”

“... idle, self-pitying, cruel and unscrupulous. Nor were his brothers much better. Probably, as David Cannadine has written, the lives, loves and morals of George III’s children made them ‘the most unloved royal generation in English history’; though the previous one, the brothers of George III, must have run them pretty close. George behaved like a ...”

“... North London suburb and in New York, bears the impress of American writers like Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, clever, nervy exhibitionists, IQs-with-i-Books, guys who, as Smith has put it, ‘know things’, writers with a gift for speedy cultural analysis, whose prose is choppy with interruption. The Autograph Man may indeed be the nearest that a ...”

“... on peoples accustomed to the autonomy afforded them by Ottoman weakness. ‘It was evident,’ David Fromkin wrote in his fascinating study A Peace to End All Peace (1989), ‘that London either was not aware of, or had given no thought to, the population mix of the Mesopotamian provinces.’ Gertrude Bell was certainly familiar with the population mix of ...”

“... so intellectual supporters of the Iraq War – among them Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick and other prominent figures in the North American liberal establishment – have focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush for giving ...”

“... a little more attention paid to his finery – including the gold chain he had from the King of France. Or then again, as a note here suggests, he may have been taking care of his ‘delicate relationship’ with Cosimo by distancing himself from Titian, who owed Cosimo a portrait. (Aretino made his money lampooning and flattering princes. Titian was at ...”

“... at the gates of the Kremlin, claiming to be the personal emissary of the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, and demanding an audience with Lenin. He was persuasive enough to be let in and managed to talk his way as far as the chairman’s secretary, if not all the way to Lenin himself. Wary Bolshevik officials summoned the newly appointed British ...”

“... David Ben-Gurion​ , the founder of the state of Israel, was brooding, explosive, often on the verge of collapse: every obstacle he faced was a ‘catastrophe’. He dabbled in mysticism, consulted fortune-tellers, claimed to see flying saucers, and lived according to his whims. At one point he went on an unannounced holiday from his duties as prime minister to take driving lessons on the French Riviera; on another occasion, he spent a week studying Buddhism in Burma, and tried to persuade his teachers that he’d stumbled on a contradiction in their doctrine no one else had unearthed ...”

“... and after, with reminiscences by various advertisements for the system, including Kenneth Clarke, David Puttnam and Barry Hines. Listening to their recollections of taking and passing the eleven-plus makes me wonder whether I ever took it at all. I had jumped one or two classes at my primary school so by July 1944 when I left to go to secondary school, I was ...”