“... Great art collections formed by individuals are generally highly specialised – French Impressionist paintings, English sporting pictures, early Chinese bronzes – or somewhat specialised – Classical antiquities, Old Master drawings, Islamic art. What is special about George Ortiz’s collection of antiquities and ethnographic art, part of which is currently on show at the Royal Academy, is its combination of quality and breadth ...”

“... the terms of our membership under Wilson. As in most of the rest of Western Europe, what the French called concertation and we called ‘tripartism’ was the order of the day. In office, the Conservatives had painlessly abandoned the neo-liberal flourishes of their 1970 Election Manifesto. The Labour Government was busily doing the same with the ...”

“... David Solkin​ ’s new book is designed to replace Painting in Britain 1530-1790, a volume of the Pelican history of art by Ellis Waterhouse, which was first published in 1953 and appeared in five separate editions, the last in 1994, nine years after Waterhouse’s death. Waterhouse’s history was quickly recognised as a classic ...”

“... David Thomson​ is best known for a series of surveys of the history of cinema as Olympian in scope as they are in evenness of tone, the most notable being his indispensable Biographical Dictionary of Film from 1975, subsequently updated in a series of editions as the New Biographical Dictionary of Film. His latest book, The Fatal Alliance, is every bit as commanding in its succinct description and analysis of a wide variety of films, good, bad and (mostly) indifferent ...”

“... Die Horen and in works like Xenien. Goethe and Herder started off as friends then clashed over the French Revolution, literature and personal morals – the prudish Herder and his wife referred to Goethe’s partner Christiane Vulpius as a ‘whore’. Weimar’s golden age ended in the early 19th century. Herder died in 1803, Schiller in 1805, the duchess in ...”

“... humanism. The distinction on which the book rests, between a rational, refined, mechanical French ‘civilisation’ and an inward, vital, organic German ‘culture’, also seems much less compelling now. It would have been familiar to Elias from Thomas Mann’s ‘Observations of an Unpolitical Man’(1918) and Alfred Weber’s writings, and it ...”

“... placid and amiable of all artistic schools – those of Dutch 17th-century genre painting and of French 18th-century painting in general – may come as something of a shock to those members of the public who do not keep their ears uncomfortably close to the ground. There have been hints, of course – but Philip Conisbee’s book is in fact the first to ...”

“... his own. Beauty is no absolute guarantee of truth or morality; art may illuminate or corrupt. As David Perkins points out in Modernism and After, Pound is incomparable amongst modern poets for the rhythmic subtlety of his evocation of sensuous beauty, of the play of light and shade. For Perkins, this lyricism is the redeeming feature of his poetry. He ...”

“... about a cyber Pearl Harbor, as techno-Orientalist. Techno-Orientalism is a term invented by David Morley and Kevin Robins to describe the ‘Japan panic’ of the late 1980s. By that time, the Japanese economy, driven by non-stop technological innovation, had become the second largest in the world after the United States. Japan was the leading creditor ...”

“... that we can understand. It reminded me of the opening of Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), where the French woman talks about all she has seen in Hiroshima and the Japanese man responds: ‘You saw nothing in Hiroshima.’ Marines marching in Danang in 1965. Is it a sign of civilisation that we want to tell the story of our disasters without breaking ...”

“... defeat in the 1993 election, which left the Party with 56 seats in a chamber of 577 Deputies. French voters, however, were indignant at being asked to perform ‘au bon plaisir du président’, as Le Monde put it – something which Jospin grasped more quickly than most. ‘What we are going to do,’ he said succinctly, ‘is to take our democratic ...”

“... Latour published in 1819. Goody exposes this as a ‘paraliterary artefact’, a creation of the French urban bourgeoisie, whose modish romanticism inclined it to the notion that there exists a universal emblematic floral code, an ‘alphabet of the fields’, primarily for use between lovers. The fashion had one fruitful outcome for all the spuriousness of ...”

“... obstinately failed to arise. The turning-point seems to have come, at any rate symbolically, with David’s Belisarius Begging Arms, the great success of the Salon exhibition of 1781. In David’s painting, a soldier stands in shocked amazement and sorrow at the spectacle of his one-time commander, the Emperor Justinian’s ...”

“... sous les auspices de la reine (Paris, 1790) demonstrates a far from reverent attitude towards the French royal family. In one scene Lafayette is described having intercourse with Marie Antoinette while being simultaneously buggered by Bailly. Marie Antoinette declares that her only pleasure is to be foutue en con and wants to engage a whole regiment of ...”

“... Davy de la Pailleterie was born in Santo Domingo in 1760, the illegitimate son of a French-born Marquis and Marie-Cessette Dumas, a plantation slave. Disowned by his father, he returned to France in 1786 and, taking his mother’s name, became a soldier. During the Revolution, he rose through the ranks and was a general at 33. He was a man of ...”