“... museum was in a strategic area, with several ministries, the railway station, a bus station, and major street intersections. Troops in tanks not more than 50 metres from the museum entrance were asked by an employee to protect the institution, but said they didn’t have orders to do so. The looters finally left on 12 April, when the media showed up. A few ...”

“... By Eng Lit I mean that puritan and parochial academic tradition of which Leavis was the major school marm. ‘When I am in London, I live effectively as an exile. As a radical intellectual, I am always on the margins, on the outside, looking in.’Peter Fuller wrote this in 1975. By the end, he had joined the club. At the time of his death in a road ...”

“... of ordinariness diverts any readers from the prose of the early 19th-century labourer-poet John Clare, as rooted a resident of his native Helpston in Northamptonshire as Turner was of East Hoathly in Sussex. Clare was not so sustained a diarist as Turner, but he kept a Journal for a year in 1824-5, which Anne Tibble and Margaret Grainger give in their ...”

“... I saw no cowboys on television but plenty on the movie screen, from the Lone Ranger and Tonto to John Wayne, and I still have a picture of myself as a little boy in a cowboy outfit with a hat and chaps and toy pistols. It’s a small indication of how deeply influenced Cubans were by our mighty neighbour to the north, and the way the fiction of the ...”

“... on land at Crécy (1346, followed by the capture of Calais in 1347), at Poitiers (1356, where King John of France was taken prisoner, and which Sumption reconstructs superbly), and the Black Prince’s final ‘disastrous’ victory at Nájera in Spain (1367). The story also has its decisive turning points in politics and diplomacy, starting with the ...”

“... social organisation. In this way Freddie rather self-consciously continued a tradition: Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, are its great names. Those of genuine religious belief, but, far more frequently, fellow-travellers with the pious, have objected to this tradition. I can’t quite see why. The great faiths have their bishops and their ...”

“... they produced to support their case seem comically inadequate: a self-important windbag named Dr John F. Condon, who agreed to testify against Hauptmann only after the police had threatened to charge him with complicity in the kidnapping; a down-and-out hillbilly who was paid to say he had seen Hauptmann near the Lindbergh estate on the night of the ...”

“... issue to be settled on non-controversial lines. This was a serious phase in his career, as John Grigg’s fine biography makes clear. It is certainly not enough to dismiss the 1910 coalition memorandum, as Mr Sykes does, as the product of ‘an attack of nerves’. From 1910 onwards, L.G. was to some degree an Empire man, if not protectionist. He was a ...”

“... are so fond of the ‘inscrutability’ of Japanese faces. I fear, then, for this splendid book by John David Morley, based on his three-year stay in Japan during the mid-Seventies, which adopts the approach of assuming the Japanese to be human beings, and rather ordinary ones at that. Pictures from the Water Trade is a mixture of narrative, descriptive ...”

“... the Symbolists inherited the Prazian pathological repertoire, especially the terrible woman and a major obsession with hair, and this kind of thing, a sort of Salome-complex, made them prone to allegory, though allegory was against their theoretical principles. Munch is particularly important to Goldwater’s conception of Symbolism, and he surveys the ...”

“... and Hawksmoor’. Invoking those artists rather flatters whoever designed it (Orbach proposes John James). The third prodigy of the English baroque, Thomas Archer, like Vanbrugh worked nearby in Dorset and Hampshire (both of which south Wiltshire might comfortably be part of). Vanbrugh is the possible author of Netherhampton House, between Salisbury and ...”

“... to be of no effect, allowing him to commission Catholics as army officers at a time when the major threat to the nation was believed to come from the Catholic states of Europe. He then packed the 12-judge court which was going to decide the legality of what he was doing. Its finding in favour of a regal power to suspend or dispense with Parliament’s ...”

“... defence of nations’. Who were the heroes? No one below the rank of captain (or, in the army, major-general) was commemorated in St Paul’s. Soldiers and sailors appear in a few of the monuments, gazing upward in adulation. There were no ‘general war monuments’ to the fallen, in St Paul’s or elsewhere: this refusal to develop ‘a more democratic ...”

“... You don’t have to know a lot about 17th-century British history to see that many of the major events of that century are represented in miniature in Bennett’s town: a revolution of the saints has come before the novel begins, while a restoration of the corrupt Lord Savile, and even a great fire, come at its end. Havoc’s aspirations extend more ...”

“... This effect presages the ‘dark style’ met later in the exhibition in Caravaggio’s St John the Baptist in the Wilderness (1603) and his Salome of c.1609, a forsaking of fine description for brute urgency that met with Bellori’s censure. For a follower, like Bellori, of the Italian tradition based on figure drawing and epitomised by Raphael, the ...”