“... Behind every great man is a great spin-doctor. Tony Blair has gorgeous pouting Alistair Campbell, exhack, ex-alcoholic, ex-pornographer, all-round thug and family-values man. What a guy! William Hague meanwhile is not a great man and behind him is Sebastian Coe. Lately, however, he has employed the services of another gorgeous ex-hack, Amanda Platell, fun-loving Aussie, the femme fatale of the Mirror Group, ex-editor of the Sunday Express, and now would-be novelist ...”

“... exes are a hard-publishing lot. So far we have had diaries from two of its central figures, David Blunkett and Alastair Campbell, and from a spin-doctor hanger-on (Lance Price); a memoir by its most senior diplomat, the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer; and now memoirs by the former prime ...”

“... The earlier plays of David Mamet seemed to spring from a meeting between Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter, as if the characters from The Caretaker or The Homecoming had caught the American anxieties of Death of a Salesman. Pinter is also never far from the later plays, and he directed Oleanna in London; but other, more oblique influences now hover in the air ...”

“... ask when the clothing firm Benetton, by using a photograph on a poster of the dying Aids activist David Kirby, borrowed concern and pity for commercial ends. But the situation is complicated. In other contexts advertising techniques were taken up vigorously by Aids activists. Indeed, a poster was produced showing the same image with the message, ‘There’s ...”

“... Students’ Union at Cardiff (where his wife Glenys was a full-time NUS official) Kinnock, like David Steel, whose beginnings in the Student Representative Council at Edinburgh were very similar, is a standard-bearer of the Sixties generation of student politicians. But NUS politics, different entirely from the debating-society politics of the Oxbridge ...”

“... proceedings. The Young Spartans is a history painting – it links him directly with Ingres and David – yet the bodies it shows are adolescent, as surely modern children as the rats who later became his models. It challenges the convention of the well-formed statuesque body as the vehicle for the characters of history. When he painted a carriage at the ...”

“... having gone. Degas’s late work could not have existed without his immersion in the tradition of David and Ingres, neither could it have flourished within their shade. Kendall opens his catalogue with a remark made by Renoir: ‘If Degas had died at fifty, he would have been remembered as an excellent painter, no more: it is after his fiftieth year that his ...”

“... Victor Pasmore – there were more eccentric talents of various sizes, like Stanley Spencer and David Jones, who were very English (or very Welsh) and not international at all. In drawings of wrapped sculpture in landscape and moonstruck megaliths Moore and Paul Nash gave even Surrealism an English edge. You could find evidence of deep-rooted native ...”

“... as points are needlessly laboured, repeated and rehearsed. By comparison, White’s other work, on Campbell Bunk, much shorter in length, and with the evidence more thoughtfully and completely integrated into the text, is more vivid, immediate and evocative, rather than less. It is perhaps a pity that the author, on his own admission, succumbed here to the ...”

“... to them. In 1987, the Independent published a long article by its Northern Ireland correspondent, David McKittrick, rubbishing Fred Holroyd’s claims, and saying: ‘We have established that it’ – the photograph – ‘was taken by the Garda Technical Bureau, which circulated it.’ Bruce pays tribute to McKittrick as one of his sources of ...”

“... returns on investment were higher than in the metropolitan countries. In Dead in the Water Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel describe Lloyd’s first 270 years as ‘an invitation-only investment club for preserving wealth and privilege’. In the 1960s, however, liquidity crises brought on by the end of colonialism opened the door to nouveau riche individual ...”

“... to dwell on the horrid actuality of crucifixion, or draw less than perfectly pneumatic flesh. David Jones was right when he spoke of the ‘toyishness’ of Gill’s sculpture, of ‘lack of weight and volume’ and of ‘a linear grace ... not always foiled enough so that too often elegance and sometimes a positive slickness harmed his work’. The ...”

“... figures are not unresolved in this way, nor are Degas’s, or Moore’s come to that, or even David Smith’s. It can be argued that this lack of poise is a positive thing, part of Epstein’s style, but it seems probable that, at best, it will in the end be judged a provincialism, akin to Hogarth’s ramshackle perspective. Although Gardiner insists that ...”

“... or precluding hauteur; Ingres would rediscover the immaculate enamelled gradations of Holbein; and David invent poses and discover expressions which would give concrete form to abstract notions about new men in a new society. When the idea that mystery and natural authority attach to privilege became absurd, Sargent would still be able to give it a certain ...”

“... William ‘Bronco Bill’ Sutherland, had a reputation every bit as evil as that of Alastair Campbell or Gordon Brown’s frightful pair, Charlie Whelan and Damian ‘McPoison’ McBride. Nor was it always the PM’s press spokesmen who dripped the poison. At the time of Suez, Eden’s spokesman, William Clark, was startled to get a call from the Tory ...”