“... in the south-eastern hamlet of Saint-Etienne de Saint-Geoirs foreshadowed his career as a bandit king. But his father’s early death pushed the family towards increasingly risky business ventures. In 1748, the 23-year-old Louis signed a large contract to supply French army camps in the Italian Alps with food, and together with two partners organised a ...”

“... which has recently been brilliantly treated in a collection of essays edited by Jenny Doctor, David Wright and Nicholas Kenyon.* In terms (for instance) of its performing space, the crucial dates were 1893 and 1941 (when the Queen’s Hall was destroyed and the concerts moved to the Albert Hall); in terms of sponsorship and organisation, the key years ...”

“... Palmier’s sombre encyclopedia of exile, published in French in 1987 and now translated by David Fernbach, offers seemingly endless evidence of the ways in which exile often punished over and over again those who fled Germany after 1933. One story is symptomatic. Hans Bendgens-Henner, a pacifist refugee who had first settled in Holland, was expelled ...”

“... beggars in West African market places go mad in a style which resembles that of Poor Tom in King Lear. It may be that Pratt is acting out the cycle of manic depression because he has heard of it (like a Theory of Humours) and thinks he ought to follow the pattern. Two of Pratt’s three doctors are nicknamed Dr Phyz and Dr Psyches, the latter being ...”

“... in my view, but that’s a topic for another day.)The head scientist at Nvidia was a man called David Kirk. As he told Witt,‘with parallel computing, it really took us a fair amount of convincing to talk Jensen into it … Same with CUDA. We really had to make the business case.’ But with AI, Huang experienced a Damascene epiphany. ‘He got it ...”

“... completed with the addition of Landseer’s lions. The first major Wellington statue was placed, King Kong-like, atop Decimus Burton’s arch on Constitution Hill in 1846, but was so derided that it was removed in 1883 and consigned to the rustic obscurity of Aldershot’s military scrubland. A second official monument to the Iron Duke had been in the making ...”

“... as the 1750s, in sermons, poems, ballads and silk sashes that bore the message ‘long live the king.’ Frederick and his successors were adept at playing up to the image. Frederick William IV, who acceded to the throne in 1840, was not the deluded romantic loon of so many accounts, but a monarch with a sharp appreciation of political symbols and how to ...”

“... and incest that dominated the proceedings against Marie-Antoinette? As for the execution of the King, even at the time observers did not fail to compare the spectacle to a ritual sacrifice offered up to the jealous goddess Liberty. Hunt takes as her starting point Freud’s classic investigation into the origins of religion and society in Totem and ...”

“... were arguing vigorously that the journals and other descriptive writings of explorers such as David Thompson, Simon Fraser and Alexander MacKenzie were the first contributions to Canadian literature, and these works teem with a sense of the forests and prairies, lakes and rivers as the inexhaustible new land in which settlers had to strive to make ...”

“... protested that this was the sort of arbitrary behaviour for which Cromwell had lambasted the late king, and demanded that the unjust tax be repaid to him. Cromwell first tried to browbeat Cony into submission, then threw him in prison. Cony’s lawyer, the eminent Sir John Maynard, demanded that he be set free, and the judges in the case were minded to ...”

“... Agincourt, to conquer Normandy and to win the crown of France. It was a providential escape for a king K.B. McFarlane called ‘the greatest man that ever ruled England’, but as Malcolm Vale points out in the preface to his new book, it may have been formative in other ways: for all his military success, Henry would fight only one more battle, and there was ...”

“... set the members at odds with the leadership of the Alliance and represented a direct rebuke of David Owen’s much more hawkish SDP. Labour was different. ‘The Labour Party will never die’ was one of Thatcher’s mantras. What Labour did mattered because it was the only alternative party of government. And in this case the party members were in tune ...”

“... Yet the price paid for good sources at this stage of history is that they rarely agree. Take King Harold’s arrow in the eye, a central icon of English history. We have a number of accounts of his death, all of which differ. What may well be the earliest version (though not all historians agree) has him cut down by William himself, together with the ...”

“... is only death here now.’ Only death apart from her and the severed head of an android called David. She is going to connect him to his separated body, and he will steer the ship to another planet. They haven’t got on well during the movie – ‘We have had our differences,’ the android says in his formal, English manner – but perhaps need and ...”

“... Adjustment, no matter how comfortable it appears to be, is never freedom.’ David Reisman said that in The Lonely Crowd, a work of academic/pop sociology, published in the US in the late Forties; much read and remarked on at the time, and now forgotten. I looked it up the other day when I was due to say something at the South Bank Centre in connection with the Cities on the Move exhibition at the Hayward ...”