“... difficult closeted homes.’Bacon spent a great deal of time with Lacy in Tangier and the South of France, where they met a number of writers. Allen Ginsberg described Bacon as ‘a great English painter … who looks like an overgrown seventeen-year-old schoolboy … wears sneakers and tight dungarees and black silk shirts … like[s] to be whipped and paints ...”

“... said that unless the German army withdrew it would mean war. ‘Broken-hearted I begged David Margesson to do something but he was determined. “It must be war, Chips, old boy.”’ When the declaration came the following morning, Channon felt that ‘our old world or all that remains of it, is committing suicide, whilst Stalin laughs.’But for ...”

“... for the fourth time in its brief history, to prevent the resignation of the first minister, David Trimble. Just over a year later, on 26 November 2003, the much postponed Assembly election took place, with the DUP and Sinn Féin emerging as the largest parties, gaining ground from moderate unionists and nationalists. A review of the working of the Good ...”

“... its chance. Despite an offer by Nasa to launch British scientific payloads free, Britain persuaded France, Italy and West Germany to join it in the European Launcher Development Organisation, or Eldo, an attempt to build a European satellite launcher using Blue Streak as a first stage. Eldo was driven by Macmillan’s pro-European policy and British ...”

“... needle-pointer from Singer; at the Albion Works, William Gallacher of the BSP; at Beardmore’s, David Kirkwood, who had recently joined the ILP and was a reluctant supporter of the war (‘I was too proud of the battles of the past to stand aside and see Scotland conquered’); and at Barr and Stroud, John Muir, also of the SLP.The strike ended after a ...”

“... are. Why bother to detoxify yourself, as the far-right Rassemblement National has done in France, now that Trump has succeeded by ‘becoming the very devil he was accused of being’, as Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, pointed out? ‘The Trump tornado has changed the world in just a few weeks,’ Orbán declared. ‘Yesterday we were ...”

“... assignment. MacArthur had learnt a lot, however. The first American units to fight in France were clearly going to reap a lot of publicity. MacArthur argued that one of these units should be neither from the regular army, nor the National Guard – both of which were closely tied to their states of origin – but from a new formation with men from ...”

“... and died in Beverly Hills in 1976. He made 17 films in Germany before leaving in 1933, one film in France in 1934, and 24 films in the US between 1936 and 1956. He directed his three last films in Germany. But even tyrannical directors need a lot of help, and I take ‘Fritz Lang’ to mean not only a historical person but also whatever controlling spirit we ...”

“... in 1956, its assets impounded and its members pursued through the courts. Unlike in Italy or France, Germany’s social democrats had no rivals on the left. When Willy Brandt took office in 1969 as the first postwar SPD chancellor, he did so in coalition with the liberal, free-market FDP. The coalition governments of Brandt and Helmut Schmidt changed the ...”

“... move to the Pyrenees, where they discover a ‘little, English meadow, locked in the arms of France’, and set about rebuilding the house which could no longer be sustained in the deteriorated nation that had once been home. In a way that Rybczynski the DIY architect might appreciate, the Pleydells choose to do without the expertise of professional ...”

“... of the first beneficiaries, Macmillan paying the then record sum of £7000 for American rights to David Grieve in the (disappointed) hope of repeating the phenomenal success of her previous hit, Robert Elsmere. After the ending of the three-voller in 1894, and still more with the expansion of the market in the 1900s, the possibilities for large earnings from ...”

“... surprised when it was trounced at the polls in 2010.Three years​ before the financial crisis, David Cameron had been elected to lead the Conservatives, promising to make them a more appealing alternative to Labour after the serial fiascos of his predecessors. Unlike them, he was not a Eurosceptic and made sure he got into office without damaging ...”

“... the judges, seize the banks and instruct the king to dismiss his ministers and end the war with France. This plot was the invention of Robert Watt, who until a year earlier had been a spy in the pay of Dundas, and who perhaps even now was acting on Dundas’s instructions as an agent provocateur. Dundas disowned him, however, and Watt was charged with high ...”

“... into the reading room.’ And it’s used defensively, to protect her privacy. ‘Have written to David Godwin pretending not to understand exactly and hope that will keep him at bay.’ After Offshore, Fitzgerald wrote six more novels, of which two more were nominated for the Booker. Since her death in 2000 it has become common to talk of her as one of the ...”

“... My mother was sitting on some steps down to the sea in Monte Carlo or somewhere in the south of France. Walking down those steps to the sea was a man I’d only heard of from my mother. It was Douglas Fairbanks Jr. A playboy who lived in a mansion and played as boys with rich mothers and fathers do. My mother was posing, with one leg pointing downwards to ...”