“... of a man facing a huge breathtaking vista of mountains, mist and sun, a version of Caspar David Friedrich’s Traveller above the Sea of Clouds. A closer look tells us that this man is engaged in painting the railing in front of him, and just now standing back to survey his handiwork. In several different countries, Cartier-Bresson will show two or ...”

“... he charts as being clearly pacificist rather than pacifist, albeit one in which pacifists still held an ‘honoured place’. Defencism – the creed of most British foreign secretaries – rested on the need to retain a ‘balance of power’. However, as Ceadel points out, defencists rarely stooped to define any national interest which such a balance was ...”

“... the institution Sidney Webb created. His thinking obviously was that socialism on the Fabian model held the future in its bones. As disinterested knowledge about the economy, society and politics systematically advanced, so would the inevitability of gradualness, wave by wave, bring in the collectivist tide. Thus Webb was unmoved by Shaw’s protests that the ...”

“... in Woodward’s work. ‘A Sailor’s Thoughts on Dry Land’ is a characteristic example:   he held Daisy’s Rancid hand, that he would soon Eat, but saw her instead As a tower higher Than Sears, in whose crimson Elevators he travelled ... The crimson elevators indicate a strong sub-Freudian strain in the book, reminiscent of surrealism (there are lots ...”

“... now meant enjoying a practised familiarity with expensive rare books and manuscripts. Despite David Garrick’s bequest of his impressive collection of Renaissance playbooks to the new British Museum in 1779, this effectively meant that to be a legitimate Shakespearean critic now required the independent means to own a substantial private library – such ...”

“... workers in 1920 and organise Red Guards and factory councils; he was a Communist Party boss who held out against a united front to defeat Fascism and for a while supported the line of the Soviet Stalinists. The fictional Gramsci constructed by cultural studies is a kind of Sardinian version of a London polytechnic lecturer in discourse theory, complete with ...”

“... intellectual and Communist – following similar books in memory of John Cornford, Julian Bell and David Haden-Guest, all killed in the Spanish Civil War. (The present title, Beyond the Frontier, nods towards Stansky and Abrahams’s 1966 Journey to the Frontier, a reworking of the lives of Cornford and Bell.) Immediately after the war Frank became for many of ...”

“... the footstool and candelabra in the unfinished portrait of Madame Récamier when he was a pupil in David’s studio). The objects represented here can be traced from old inventories; indeed, an academic study exists devoted solely to Ingres’s eloquent mantelpieces. He shows not the slightest hint of embarrassment about the material expression of power ...”

“... threat. With the SNP looking certain to be the main opposition party in the new Parliament, David McLetchie, the leader of the Scottish Tories, pledged to support a minority Labour administration faced with a no confidence motion, much to the consternation of Tory strategists at Westminster and Labour spin-doctors both north and south of the ...”

“... which looks back to that earlier episode in historiography, since it derives from a colloquium held in 1996 to explore the implications of a seminal article published as long ago as 1974 by the French historian Jean Bérenger. Bérenger had argued that it was not a mere coincidence that all-powerful prime ministerial favourites ...”

“... may be because the theory is non-specific, so that no individual physicians or institutions can be held responsible. And there is an unspoken subtext: that the physicians in question were probably not Western ones. However, the reuse of unsterilised needles did not happen only in the Belgian Congo, so this theory doesn’t explain the strong correlation ...”

“... for all their showing off, Summers and Lindley did beat the rest of the BBC into Egyptian-held territory in 1973. It could be brave and revelatory: a report from Vietnam in 1966 so enraged the American press with its footage of civilian casualties and unhappy American conscripts that the Washington Post implied its reporter should be censored. Or it ...”

“... ut-Tahrir couldn’t recite their prayers correctly. Bakri said that a training session would be held, but it never materialised. At home, Husain shut himself in his room: ‘My life,’ he writes, ‘was consumed by fury, inner confusion, a desire to dominate everything, and my abject failure to be a good Muslim.’ Gradually extremism lost its appeal. He ...”

“... Blair took Alistair Campbell into the room with him and insisted that Mo Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the euro during the current Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in Euroscepticism from Philip ...”

“... him; one of them, Zeus, is saved by a trick and gives him an emetic; he vomits them up and is then held captive in Tartarus. The nastiness of the two stories is the same.) The Jakob Freud who emerges from The Interpretation of Dreams is unrelievedly abject. The most famous instance is not a dream but a memory: the insistent, resonant story of humiliation that ...”