“... death. On returning from his Italian travels in 1858, Eastlake would have found his friend Austin Henry Layard working on the proofs of a long article on fresco painting which appeared that October in the Quarterly Review. It is here that we find the first modern expression in print of the conviction that Piero was an artist of the first rank. We can be ...”

“... extracted from others.’ In the other major recent English-language biography, Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin (1991), the events in Darwin’s life were juxtaposed with the great social and political upheavals of his times: Darwin against the background of the Chartists, the Crystal Palace, the Paris Commune, the Crimean War. Browne never loses ...”

“... and a contemporary woodcut from Germany labelled ‘the two great impostors’ shows him facing James Nayler, the messianic English Quaker. Nayler had entered Bristol like Jesus entering Jerusalem, on the back of an ass. His followers walked behind him and a sign proclaimed him King of the Jews. His movement had effects right across Europe, the Middle East ...”

“... the worst possible advertisement for such treatment. He was extremely intelligent. Leaving aside Henry VIII, Charles II and William III, he was perhaps our cleverest King since the Middle Ages. He had polished manners, and was also musical, a lover of literature and a patron of the arts. But there his virtues ended. He was selfish, idle, self-pitying, cruel ...”

“... sounds like the title of a novel, and the book isn’t without its literary qualities. Parsing Henry Kissinger’s memoirs, Feeney notes that he ‘presents himself as a sort of Germanic Jeeves, unflappable and long-suffering, who again and again saves the day for his maladroit employer, a malevolent, egregiously Middle American Bertie ...”

“... their appointment bowed to the logic that would soon be spelled out by the republican theorist James Harrington, who remarked that England could be governed only through a nobility or an army. The traditional intermediaries between the Government and the shires, the Lords Lieutenant, had succumbed to the pressures of the Puritan Revolution, and so military ...”

“... various reasons for the decision including the fact that ‘political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.’ Lehrer’s work is sometimes Swiftian in its darkness and Parr emphasises that it was this that inspired him. Humour not photography was his first passion. ‘I studied humour very carefully from a very early ...”

“... in politics. Political leaders became folk heroes, with nicknames like the Great Compromiser (Henry Clay), the Godlike Daniel (Daniel Webster), the Great Commoner (Bryan), the Plumed Knight (James G. Blaine) and, most popular of them all, Old Hickory (Jackson). The central event of Jackson’s eight years as president ...”

“... the inexorable march of transnational capital.The Californian gold rush began in January 1848 when James Marshall, a US army veteran working at John Sutter’s sawmill on the American River, claimed to have pulled a gold nugget out of the millrace (other accounts credited the discovery to a colleague of Marshall’s called Indian Jim). Within a year tens of ...”

“... variety of causes, in which the common theme has been a desire to take on the evil-doers, from Henry Kissinger to Mother Teresa to Bill Clinton to Saddam Hussein. The United States is a great country for political romantics because there is always something going on. There are almost limitless occasions on which to display yourself. But what’s wrong with ...”

“... In the post-war world it did not start like that, although appearances were unpromising. When Henry Truman became President on the death of Roosevelt in 1945, it was customary to laugh at him. It was said that the United States had exalted the common, ordinary man, and that they were now landed with one as their leader. But the critics were confounded as ...”

“... Like many people​ who keep meaning to get round to things, William Henry Fox Talbot was disheartened to discover, early in 1839, that a rival had claimed credit for something he’d been experimenting with for years. On 7 January, it was announced to the Académie des Sciences in Paris that Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre had permanently fixed images created by light ...”

“... bin Laden’s hideout under torture. ‘A racist society can’t but fight a racist war,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1967, ‘the assumptions acted on at home are also acted on abroad.’ During the war on terror the traffic between the US and various shithole countries wasn’t only in assumptions: there was also a wholesale exporting of ...”

“... is free.’ But Padmore wasn’t in the mood to celebrate. Much to their surprise, as Leslie James recounts in George Padmore and Decolonisation from Below (2014), Padmore and Pizer had found themselves flying to Ghana ‘on a VIP plane with former British governors, the British parliamentary delegation, the Norwegian ambassador and delegations from ...”

“... turned out to be an abortive attempt to raise an 11-ton section of the hull. The movie director James Cameron, fascinated with what he called the Everest of wrecks, filmed a dive that became part of his blockbuster 1997 movie (the footage was recently repurposed for a documentary). The new 3D version of the movie released in time for the centenary took its ...”