“... an idealistic minority rather than to the mass of capitalists.’ A good example of an idealist is Victor Schloecher, son of a rich porcelain manufacturer, whom we hear of in the later stages of France’s move towards emancipation. Capitalism could make use of, or could do without, ‘colonialism, monarchism, racism and slavery itself’: a far-reaching ...”

“... When Tooley stepped down in 1988 he’d been with the House since 1955, first as assistant to David Webster, the Liverpool department-store manager who’d built it up from its wartime use as a dance-hall, and then for 18 years as general director. The high point of Webster’s reign was the Georg Solti era (1961-71). Tooley presided over the rather ...”

“... of Latin is wide-ranging and excellent. Other chapters suffer from being wide-ranging and bad. Victor Kiernan’s ‘Languages and Conquerors’ should have stuck to the subcontinent which he knows well instead of skipping round the world and across three millennia. It may be this diachronic range that makes Arabia ‘half empty’ on page 194 but endure ...”

“... working in Washington’s fields upsetting. Lost in the debate was the fact that the artist, Victor Arnautoff, a communist, had used the murals to challenge the prevailing narrative of Washington’s life and, indeed, American history more broadly. His murals were intended to show that the country’s economic growth and territorial expansion ...”

“... his arms ‘painfully thin, like two twists of fuse wire’, take down the local champion. As the victor counts his winnings, Seth hears him sing, and repeat, a single line of blues. Playing the recording back later on, he is amazed to hear not just that line but a whole song, lasting several minutes. The song, adroitly concocted by Kunzru from a series of ...”

“... helped to release its potential.In order to understand the revolution, according to François Victor Aulard, a historian of the Third Republic, ‘it is necessary to love it.’ Jaurès never concealed his sympathy for it, though he took the revolutionaries to task for their mistakes and condemned the Terror. In the end he absolved them of their ...”

“... as a writer, and the restraint is her eroticism. But the relationship between Inez Christian Victor and a fascinating government man, Jack Lovett (these are names out of the cashmere drawer, smelling of L’Air du Temps), is heady with intimations of passion, or the rapture of fine amity. It is a book set against the great time-zone distances of the ...”

“... and rhythm have the flippancy of stand-up comedy. The voice has Eeyore in it, and Morrissey and Victor Meldrew, and could only be English and from that postwar, post-punk generation, with its never-before-or-since education, and opportunities for buying stuff, and unmistakeable spoilt-brat whine. The current book starts forking and doubling before it has ...”

“... I adore war,’ Julian Grenfell reported to his mother from the Flemish trenches in 1914, in a letter which she proudly sent on for anonymous publication in the Times. Stalking Germans through the mud was not very different from stalking partridges, as he noted in his game book: ‘November 16th; 1 Pomeranian. November 17th; 2 Pomeranians.’ Two decades later in Spain, Julian Bell informed his mother Vanessa that the war in which he was serving as an ambulance man was ‘perpetually entertaining and very satisfactory’, one of the chief pleasures being ‘getting back into male society ...”

“... hero’s refusal to meet his mother at a victory dinner; the arm’s-length relations with his son David, whom he temporarily disinherited after his divorce (the first in the family); the decision to cut his brother Brian’s wedding and go to a football match instead; and other incidents showing a perverse insensitivity. The Princesse de Merode, whose chateau ...”

“... of what now looks like late Post-Impressionism – Matthew Smith, Duncan Grant, Frances Hodgkins, 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 ...”

“... into a sense of false security by the nature of the notably anodyne Preface contributed by Dr David Edwards, the present Provost of Southwark, to the 1983-85 Crockford, the first to appear under the new dispensation. How it was that they failed to spot any danger signals when Dr Bennett’s manuscript came in remains, however, a mystery. For Dr ...”

“... late 1880s through to the early 1900s. In 1890, at the age of 55, Degas rented a studio at 37 rue Victor Massé in Montmartre, which he used for the next 22 years. Contemporary accounts describe the studio as large, dim, dusty and crowded. Most of the pictures in the present exhibition must have been made there, but they no more describe it than a film ...”

“... to review how the gambling industry in Britain had come to be organised. It was chaired by Victor Rothschild and its eclectic membership included the philosopher Bernard Williams, the sports commentator David Coleman and the agony aunt Marje Proops. The report they produced two years later was ...”

“... or ‘one’ for ‘I’, wouldn’t make the needful point. In Looking at Giacometti, David Sylvester records a similar – though far more articulated – face-off with one of Giacometti’s lean and vertical female figures. And the effect here is not simply one of identification: I feel within my muscles the stance of the figure, feel I am ...”