“... Piero’s nephew, Francesco, lived with his wife, Madonna Laudomia. It may have been a gift to mark their marriage, an important match securing an alliance with a family from the nearby town of Montevarchi. Most historians now agree that The Nativity was a private project rather than a commission, a consensus that challenges the once widely held assumption ...”

“... New Deal programme. She was assigned to the ‘easel division’, along with artists from Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock to Jack Levine and Philip Evergood. She concentrated on works of social realism, attempting ‘to catch life as it goes by, right hot off the griddle’. Longshoremen Returning from Work (1936) shows waterfront labourers – whose ...”

“... box that she has covered, she tells us, in shell pink brocade. And then she has a battle with Rose, the servant, who can’t believe that she wants the mousse kept hot over a pot of boiling water so she can eat it herself. After all, ‘it may be hours till lunchtime.’ Nothing gets in the way of Aroon and her food. ‘If it was a smothering you ...”

“... not surprising that she sought allies outside the usual royal circles. Her favourite dressmaker, Rose Bertin, was given free access to the royal apartments, and was known as ‘the female minister’. Choosing what to wear was Antoinette’s waking duty each day. With her first cup of coffee came a catalogue of samples from her wardrobe. Though the fashions ...”

“... member of the famous Neapolitan dynasty of luthiers, stood in front of the European Parliament to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It had belonged to Pál Hermann, a Jewish Hungarian composer and virtuoso cellist who had studied under Kodály and Bartók and gave concerts throughout Western and Central Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. He was ...”

“... I took a pair of silver-plated scissors in my raincoat pocket with the intent to cut another rose – yellow, if possible – from the rose garden (by the stone lion’s head fountain) just come into bloom – a rose to begin to unbud as the red, almost black-red ...”

“... both tedious and dangerous. Sir Thomas Wyatt was born in 1503, high and close to the throne, and rose higher and closer. He was the eldest son of Sir Henry Wyatt, who had been a courtier and soldier, a privy counsellor and a bureaucrat of the old school. Henry had remained loyal to Henry Tudor throughout Richard III’s reign, despite starvation and ...”

“... to put him well past his century. It’s an elastic life because baby Gielgud was so quick off the mark, the famous nose soon round the edge of the pram observing the odd behaviour of his Terry uncles and aunts. He had instantaneous success as a young actor and put his popularity with audiences to good effect, bringing Shakespeare and Chekhov to the West ...”

“... an image of cruelty which has never left her. My purpose in recounting these things is not only to mark the memory, out of the hundreds of thousands of courageous individuals who lost or risked their lives throughout Occupied Europe, of two who happen to have been members of my family. It is to point up the complex meaning of justice in a world broken ...”

“... Songhay empire, now forgotten by many Africans and largely unknown to Europeans, left a linguistic mark in the Niger basin. A dozen languages and dialects, spoken by roughly three million people, derive from the hybrid imperial vernacular. I was brought up in Niger and speak a dialect of Songhay. In my school textbooks I could decipher the titles given to the ...”

“... Mark Honigsbaum is fascinated by fever trees. The phrase may bring to mind ‘the great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees’. But Honigsbaum is not interested in Kipling’s trees, or in the beautiful flat-topped acacias of the Kenyan rift valley, which are called ‘fever trees’ because they grow in malarial districts ...”

“... The readiness of almost all of Scotland’s great nobles to serve in the royal army in 1513 was a mark of James’s standing within his realm. James and Europe’s other monarchs ruled over increasingly defined states in a world dominated by the formation and breach of leagues and alliances. James’s decision in 1502 to seek peace with England, sealed by his ...”

“... afloat. Refitted and relaunched by directors like Joseph Papp, Jonathan Miller, Ken Russell and Mark Savage as post-copyright, post-D’Oyly Carte G&S, not only Pinafore, but The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado and Princess Ida too have been successfully revived on both sides of the Atlantic. Showbusiness professionals now admire Savoy opera as a prototype ...”

“... culture is a noisy excitement; in an interview he has said: ‘When in doubt, use an exclamation mark . . . English poetry is really quiet, isn’t it? Really calm. Mine is full-on. These poems don’t whisper, they shout. The characters are frenetic and hectic, because that’s the way I remember my community.’ Of the 31 titles in Look We Have Coming to ...”

“... recommended me to the Observer. The literary editor of the Observer then was somebody called Jim Rose. He wasn’t the most literary person in the world. He was so funny. He was always quoting his mother. I lived in dread of Mr Rose’s mother, because he would always say: ‘My mother wouldn’t understand what you mean ...”