“... He struggled to find inspiration: he read widely in philosophy, fiction, poetry in English and French; frequently went to movies and plays; sometimes drove thousands of miles to New England, Mexico or the American West, yet found little to spark new work. Often his wife would provoke him by starting a picture herself. Often they would create scenes ...”

“... their origins in absolutism; they resurfaced in different forms in the social republicanism of the French Revolution and, especially, in the authoritarianism of Bismarck’s Germany. At present, the trend is away from the baroque tradition, though the new Anglo-Saxon model is not simply a revival of the puritan tradition: in modern systems of pension provision ...”

“... three liveried servants, a Malay he had brought back from the Endeavour voyage, a gardener, a French chef and two French horn players. A new set of Wedgwood Queen’s Ware china was packed for onshore entertainment.During the three years of the Endeavour’s voyage, planting the flag and tagging the plants ...”

“... poems have been shown to be translations from Ronsard and Marot, and one suspects that others have French originals. But despite this niggling, one can still make out – or invent – a certain picture of Montgomerie from these short poems. He seems to have been a poet influenced partly by the tradition of Scots court poetry going back to Dunbar, partly by ...”

“... before men had a word for it. How indeed could they have a word for it until it had happened? David Underdown, one of the five big names contributing to this festschrift, has a characteristically wise survey of ‘Community and Class’ in the English Revolution. Disregarding Hexter’s prohibitions, he concludes: ‘The Marxist model of local political ...”

“... after that first dawning sense of the historicity of society so rudely awakened by the French Revolution. David Wittenberg does much better than this, but his remarkable hypothesis is only one of the conceptual breakthroughs in this stimulating contribution to literary theory. I will dwell mainly on the three ...”

“... speaker at this rally, supposedly organised to fly the flag of resistance to state oppression, was David Icke.Icke was a BBC sports presenter in the 1980s, smooth, bland and remarkable only for a certain glassy coldness of manner. Before that he’d been a professional footballer. At a time when Britain had a handful of TV channels, everyone knew his ...”

“... But the scale of her research is daunting: she has excavated pyramids of party files, American, French and especially German documents and correspondence, and examined – last and deservedly least – Brezhnev’s so-called ‘memoirs’. Millions of copies of this multi-part ghostwritten hagiography were published and prescribed for Soviet schools. A wad ...”

“... Fry, who, with Clive Bell, ‘made it just fine to despise new English art in the name of the French avant-garde’: for them ‘any imitation of the Ecole de Paris, however pallid’ was preferable ‘to anything else, however strong’. In another essay, Hughes dwells on Howard Hodgkin’s distinguished family background, which includes ‘Roger ...”

“... ran out in the 1870s. All of the Marxes appear to have been clever with words – Simon spoke French, German, Yiddish and English – and they were quick to absorb the cosmopolitan slang of the New York streets. Simon naturalised his name to Sam and set up business as a tailor out of the same three-room apartment on East 93rd Street that held Minna, her ...”

“... Bildungsroman, the life and impressions of one young man: he even gets born with a caul on him, as David Copperfield did. Serge, however, attracts no sympathy or empathy or whatever from his creator: he’s a convergence, or rather an area of concentration, where ideas, images, words, preoccupations gather and regroup. The book is split into four main ...”

“... dreamed up much of the look, the attitude and the lyrics, though not the sound. A full year before David Bowie adopted the same hair style, Westwood had her hair bleached blonde and cut ‘coupe-sauvage’ style: tufty, asymmetrical and barmy-looking. She went to America and dressed the New York Dolls. Together, she and McLaren assembled the Sex Pistols, whom ...”

“... as precious stones.’ The ambition is breathtaking, its objects less so. I would like to believe David Erdman that even Pitt guiding Behemoth is meant as Satanic allegory, with its naked British hero putting, as always, an angelic face on Chaos and Non-Entity. But I have my doubts. Perhaps the verdict of time on the Pitt and Nelson pictures – the one, to ...”

“... efforts to organise the American premiere of Boulez’s Second Sonata – performed by the pianist David Tudor, who would premiere 4’33” – but relations between the two composers began to deteriorate as Cage’s obsession with using chance in composition proved incompatible with Boulez’s insistence that every parameter in a piece had to be carefully ...”

“... married, is with her husband and their little girl, Flora, on the train to Hereford, where David has been engaged for the season at the newly opened Garrick Theatre: It is a fact that Flora can already behave with perfect nonchalant neatness in hotels, tea-shops and classy restaurants … David and I watched Flora ...”