“... accession. Bernard Bergonzi’s The Roman Persuasion is attended by so many coincidental links to David Lodge’s recent How far can you go? that to remark on them is almost unavoidable. By ‘links’ I don’t mean influence, for they are books of very different kinds, and I should surmise from internal evidence that Bergonzi’s was written earlier. They ...”

“... part of the century. Filipczak draws attention to the career of another upwardly-mobile painter, David Teniers II, who fashioned a variant of the gallery picture at mid-century: shells, scientific instruments and so on are jettisoned in favour of works of art placed in an environment reminiscent of a modern picture collection, a constcamer. This change of ...”

“... seems to decide for the former. Kitty, after her final inane broadcast, passes her microphone to a French assistant who has been sneering at her, and who, though she has never broadcast before, is effortlessly eloquent and interesting when she does. Throughout Prêt-à-Porter Altman undermines or suppresses specific meanings or statements of intent. In an ...”

“... What if it’s not a philosophical question at all? It’s striking that Oë comes closest to his French mentors in his reportorial prose, in Hiroshima Notes. He tells the real-life story of a young man who was a child in Hiroshima in 1945. In his late teens he was diagnosed as having leukaemia, and given two years to live. In those two years he did ...”

“... In constitutional terms, this is nothing if not innovative. General Nash and his British and French counterparts are charged with creating a stable security climate to allow the civilian authorities, under the guidance of the EU mediator Carl Bildt, to establish the new constitutional order in Bosnia. A literal interpretation of Dayton means that ...”

“... the training colleges, may serve for an example; and finally direct intervention, as symbolised by David Blunkett’s threat (Independent on Sunday, 23 February) to ‘lay down from the centre exactly how reading should be taught’. Hobbes would have known what to call this: it is ‘a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, which ceaseth only in ...”

“... the theatre of a state opening of Parliament, featuring such kenspeckle figures as ‘Sir David Frost arriving to exchange a word with his father-in-law, the Duke of Norfolk and Earl Marshal’, and the Earl Marshal pointing out the patriotic wall paintings to his French guests and saying: ‘Vous ...”

“... Americans seem to relish Presidential biographies. David McCullough’s Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker ...”

“... But amid pages of pure bafflement he can be simply coruscating, and he repeatedly evinces the French dandy’s aptitude for rhetorical flourish or caustic phraseology. His fund of metaphors and analogies for illustrating musical thoughts is large: it is no trouble at all for him to bring in Turner’s painting of Windsor when talking about the dreamlike ...”

“... has a seedy charm. Built after the turn of the century, it is old-fashioned, grand with decaying French tapestries, endless public rooms, English & French prints, marble statuary, and very dirty carpets.’ The hotel’s notepaper, which Hugh had used to write to me (I have that letter), had photographs of the Crillon’s ...”

“... rulers.A collective Shia identity was strengthened after the end of the First World War, when French colonial administrators introduced separate religious courts. When Lebanon gained independence in 1943, its sectarian political system was enshrined in the National Pact, signed by Shia, Sunni and Maronite leaders. Officially, Lebanon became a ...”

“... racial preoccupations. But no one has yet given Bunche the kind of magisterial treatment David Levering Lewis gave Du Bois. In his new book, Kal Raustiala, who concentrates on Bunche’s work at the UN, admits that he hasn’t done it either. (Writing this essay, I have drawn on all three biographies and on Henry’s edition of Bunche’s ...”

“... if we think about Rosa, we enter a new cultural zone, one that subsequently would be occupied by David, Delacroix and Courbet. His San Giovanni Decollato was a forerunner of the salons of those equally proud, shouty showmen. That’s a handle you might think historians would grab at when they’re discussing the way modern art got going. But there are ...”

“... died of before. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday he had a fever. Sunday he was hospitalised. Wednesday he was dead.’ Later, there were tests. A virus ...”

“... and was attacked by Jürgen Habermas, that it created a stir. Unlike some other writers (German, French, English and American), Professor Nolte does not quite deny the existence of the annihilation camps, though he concedes to those who do that their work should be taken seriously. Instead, he argues that when, in September 1939, Dr Chaim Weizmann, then ...”