“... but how can we avoid wishing to interpret further the lingering myth of the world-conquering Alexander among these frontier peoples? This is to say nothing of the fact that these folk-tales abound, like all folk-tales, in more or less formulaic elements whose structural role is important, though their literal sense is baffling. Afghan kings seem to have ...”

“... a postmistress and a pot-boy (Bob Gliddery in Our Mutual Friend), seven surgeons, three dance-masters, a reporter (David Copperfield), a tobacconist (Mrs Chivery in Little Dorrit), two fishermen, 32 teachers, four blacksmiths, six undertakers, 45 lawyers and sixteen landladies, several magistrates, a weaver (Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times), an ...”

“... and executions that followed the murder, comparing the situation to the panic that followed Alexander II’s assassination – except that then there had been a furor over the execution of the six assassins. ‘Why is no one incensed now? . . . What right do these Bolsheviks have to deal with the country and its people so cruelly and arbitrarily ...”

“... locations ahead, and waited for them to make a move.The impetuosity of Allied generals, and their masters in Washington and Whitehall, was gradually tempered by this reality. Their armies soon faced another string of defences – the Gustav Line – transecting Italy from the Garigliano River in the west to Ortona in the east, through the Apennines and across ...”

“... dictatorship, with the return of the censor and the secret police. The Russian socialist exile Alexander Herzen, who witnessed the revolution and counter-revolution in Paris, was heartbroken. He recognised that 1848 had left Europe’s ancient order of blindly deferential monarchy in ruins. But what would replace it? In unforgettable words, Herzen ...”

“... How bad was it? In a way it was worse than a defeat, because to be defeated, an army and its masters must understand the nature of the conflict they are fighting. Britain never did understand, and now we would rather not think about it. The troops are home from a campaign that lasted 13 years, including Iraq in the middle. They are coming home from their ...”

“... In war, the spiritual anarchy of the great general confronts the physical anarchy of its facts and masters them. Montgomery had that anarchic power. And his company commander, together with a thousand other dutiful servants of the system, emphatically did not. Where did it come from? There seems little doubt – Montgomery himself did not doubt the explanation ...”

“... this picture. Flaubert​ wrote that ‘the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the history of Alexander the Great – everything depends on the execution.’ Artists had always known this, of course: Géricault did a painting called Twenty-Four Horses in Rear View (1813-14), three rows of eight (plus a twenty-fifth which has disobediently turned to face ...”

“... demanded to be satisfied by a greater precision in the assignment of monuments to periods and to masters. It is generally agreed that it was Winckelmann who gave the study of ancient art this impulse. It is true that those who turn to his Geschichte of 1764 will be disappointed if they expect the shedding of antiquarian ballast in favour of a clear sequence ...”

“... orgasmically by cream from a kolkhoz’s milk separator. A strange and electric painting by Alexander Deineka from 1926 – my examples cluster in the late 1920s, but the difference between 1926 and 1928 is already enormous – entitled Construction of New Workshops. And, fourth, the other pivotal space in the show, in painful tension with Memorial: the ...”

“... made the Renaissance the Renaissance. There were the people: Lorenzo de’ Medici, a Borgia pope (Alexander VI), Savonarola. There was the arcane classical scholarship: before Pico, no Christian had studied the Jewish Kabbalah. There was his reputed physical beauty: in paintings he looked like one of Botticelli or Raphael’s angels, pale and ...”

“... looking at light as it is. Instead, they automatically imported the illumination of the old masters, with Dutch, Italian or Spanish light unthinkingly transplanted into Parisian scenes. But Dutch light, governed as it is by the proximity of the sea, of canals and rising mists, then filtered through narrow sash windows with small square panes, was ...”

“... youthful delinquency but knowing that they would one day be sworn in as respectable tradesmen and masters. Maus, however, goes further, contending that Hal has all the cake and eats it: ‘the advantages of land and the advantages of chattels, the advantages of being an elder son and the advantages of being a younger son, the advantages of being a father and ...”

“... of the most remarkable products of Counter-Reformation energy. The Jesuits have always been past masters at self-presentation – an aspect of their mission to communicate the Christian message as effectively as possible. Not least is the hagiographical narrative shaping the life of Loyola himself, a central moment of which was a personal disaster in ...”

“... five days into two separate congresses, because it proved impossible to bridge the divide between masters and journeymen.Liberals​ revered parliaments and looked with disgust on the clubs and assemblies of the radicals which seemed to them to parody the sublime procedural culture of properly elected and constituted chambers. Even more alarming, from the ...”