“... and turned a scholar into a suppressor of evidence. I suggested the problem was one mentioned by David Hackett Fischer, that history is what the evidence says it is. If the evidence is fragmentary, misleading or missing, then the history is just going to be wrong, or at best incomplete. No, no, no. That was alright as far as it went. But Spender-Lehmann were ...”

“... who aims to convey a youthful wonder at the object world around him. Here, however, innocence means less freedom from convention than delight in the commodity image, even identification with it, as he suggests in the account of a primal scene he gave in an interview with David Sylvester: Childhood’s important to ...”

“... Bernhard (1931-89) is marked by deaths: those of his majoritarian and minoritarian translators David McLintock and Ewald Osers, in 2003 and 2011 respectively; and in 2015 that of Carol Brown Janeway, his publisher at Knopf, his unlikely champion over decades (because, for all his influence and cultishness, Bernhard in English never exactly sold), and the ...”

“... and friend. There are at least two reasons for this. The story has often been told, notably by David Cannadine, of how the long agricultural depression broke the power of the British aristocracy, but it also drove tenant famers and labourers off the land and into the cities and suburbs; a million or more had emigrated by 1914. As a legacy of this flight ...”

“... making it the third most expensive work by a living artist, after Jeff Koons’s Rabbit and David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist. The buyer, Vignesh Sundaresan, called it a ‘significant piece of art history’. Sundaresan doesn’t own the copyright to Everydays. All he bought was a non-fungible token (NFT): a collection of data stored using ...”

“... for millions of dollars in political contributions and campaign loans.’ That’s what it means to move to the middle ground, of course. The fabled Republican negative campaigners may have a problem with exploiting it, even so. I can’t see them choosing to emphasise how soft money finances hard politics. In this, as in many issues between the ...”

“... in the ennui of being highly-educated and having nothing to do. Clearly, writing was, in part, a means to independence, and yet it took years, and the interference of an uncle, to effect even a partial move away. In fact, she can’t properly be said to have left home at all: home left her in 1925 when her mother died. Jane Emery is unemphatic about the hold ...”

“... another of her blows at the practice of trying to settle international disputes peacefully, by means of the United Nations. UN mediation may not always have gone very well, but it seems a lot more promising than competitive appeals to international law, followed or preceded by bloodshed. But the debate, as I have implied, was not all sweetness and ...”

“... bore – he is so insistent as to be a positive fatigue.’ This tart commentary was provided by David Alexander Edward Lindsay, better-known (after he succeeded his father in 1913) as the 27th Earl of Crawford, and probably best-known as the tenth Earl of Balcarres, a junior title that did not bar him from the House of Commons. To unravel his pedigree, as ...”

“... to be faced with an increasingly volatile and sceptical electorate. For this reason, it is by no means clear whether the growth of new parties in Western Europe heralds a process of realignment – such as occurred in Britain in the Twenties – or a process of dealignment whereby parties cease to be able to rely upon particular socio-economic groups for ...”

“... it all seems to sustain is an argument that the events of ’56 did not need an organisation, or means of communication, or plans. ‘The Reform Communist intellectuals [significant distinction] – the writers and journalists provided the least leadership of all; they were the nobodies of the uprising.’ Instead, a ‘Jewish writer and Communist’ like ...”

“... This is the book of the exhibition. Modern interest in Arcimboldo dates from his inclusion, by means of enlarged photographs, in the exhibition ‘Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism’, organised by Alfred Barr at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1936. Margaret Barr remembers: Alfred and I were in Paris in 1931, going around to the galleries. We went ...”

“... stories as words are at conveying pictures. An observer who had not already heard the story of David and Goliath would see in the Speculum picture nothing more specific than a king who has just cut off the head of a giant (the latter identified not so much by his size as by his club). Indeed, even if one does already know a story, it is by no ...”

“... with accounts of visits to Adolf Grünbaum in Pittsburgh, to Richard Swinburne in Oxford, to David Deutsch in Headington, to John Leslie in Canada, to Derek Parfit, again in Oxford. He meets Roger Penrose in New York, has phone conversations with Steven Weinberg and John Updike. These conversations become a way of evoking possibilities as much as seeking ...”

“... devolved government in Northern Ireland’. Wishful thinking, Sinn Féin says. All this means that there will be no Northern Ireland Executive when the twentieth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement is marked at the beginning of April. The Clintons, Tony Blair, George Mitchell and Bertie Ahern were all expected to make an appearance. Recently it ...”