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“... any good’). The rest depended on private means. He guided the work of his scientific friends, drew on the scientific exchange of the London societies, held what amounted to seminars at Downe, employed modern technology where it helped, as in the use of photographs to analyse human facial expression, but above all ...”

“... dangling from the crow’s nest at the bottom of the ocean. The captain of the Titanic, Edward Smith, had known all day that he was heading into ice. Not only had the weather turned much colder: messages had been received from four other ships warning him that there were icebergs in the vicinity. Just before lunch ...”

“... Shortly after her husband’s death, Joy Williams entrusted the task to the Welsh historian Dai Smith, who had known (and greatly admired) Williams in the last decade or so of his life, and who shared many of his political allegiances. Smith was given unrestricted access to Williams’s papers; as, in effect, the ...”

“... any one in Holy Orders [Johnson] habitually listened with a grace and charming deference … What drew the blasting flash must have been not the question itself, but the manner in which it was asked … Say the words aloud: ‘Were not Dodd’s sermons addressed to the passions?’ They are words which, if you have any dramatic and histrionic sense, cannot be ...”

“... It’s part of the general atmosphere of fin de règne. Mhanda was the sort of young boy in Ian Smith’s Rhodesia who was bound to grow up to become a guerrilla. His father was a keen African nationalist and his childhood heroes were not singers or soccer stars but Nkrumah, Sekou Touré and Kenyatta. He went to the primary school at Zvishavane which the ...”

“... the Society. Not long ago I received the present of a book called The English Companion by Godfrey Smith.* This is described on the dust-cover as ‘An Idiosyncratic A to Z of England and Englishness’. Godfrey Smith’s taste is wide: towns, shops, sports, epochs, writers, eatables. Public Schools come next to Pubs, and ...”

“... culture featured one of Botticelli’s illustrations to the Divine Comedy, but claimed that Dante drew it, there would be an outcry. Do publishers think that dead Arab painters don’t really matter? Fortunately, the text of The Middle East has not been written by the author of the captions. Bernard Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Near Eastern Studies at ...”

“... which were so distinctively of the French 19th century in character that Timothy Wilson-Smith’s biography leaves the British reader feeling around for something familiar to get a grip on. Perhaps one should first rid oneself of the idea that Delacroix’s Anglophilia is going to be any help, and assume that England, as much as Morocco, was ...”

“... Anthology, edited by the polymath collector, underground film-maker, and beatnik shaman Harry Smith, is arcane, but the critical world has been primed for its reappearance. Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good and Greil Marcus’s The Invisible Republic – recent accounts of the curious development of American folk music – both devote considerable ...”

“... of skulduggery emerged. In 1992, Conor Cruise O’Brien and the Australian diplomat George Ivan Smith, both of whom were working for the UN in the Congo in the early 1960s, wrote to the Guardian arguing that Hammarskjöld had been the victim of a kidnap that went wrong. The following year, in another letter to the Guardian, Bengt Rosio, the former Swedish ...”

“... chevelures merging into one. The casting, the lighting and the face and body language that Millais drew out of his actors secured The Princes in the Tower an instant niche in Britain’s national image repertory, where it has remained ever since. Millais’s portraiture could grapple confidently with the auras of the mighty: Tennyson, Gladstone, Disraeli. He ...”

“... are not unresolved in this way, nor are Degas’s, or Moore’s come to that, or even David Smith’s. It can be argued that this lack of poise is a positive thing, part of Epstein’s style, but it seems probable that, at best, it will in the end be judged a provincialism, akin to Hogarth’s ramshackle perspective. Although Gardiner insists ...”

“... a divided Malian army has fallen apart; on whom shall we lean? Within days, the Villepin doctrine drew strength from events on the ground. French forces began operations with aerial bombardments of Islamist strongholds in northern Mali, a desert two and a half times the size of the United Kingdom; one helicopter pilot was killed. So ended the hope of ‘zero ...”

“... her out as different from her wealthier classmates. Swimming offered a form of belonging. What drew her to the pool wasn’t fame – she knew early on she would never be a star – but the quieter pleasure of competence, the ‘unwavering details of technical precision’, the team sweatshirts that made her ‘look like something recognisable’, the ...”

“... in England’. I do not know what led Lowe to believe that ‘the great public schools that drew pupils from all over England came later.’ Whitehead went to Sherborne at the age of 15 and in due course became head of the school, a member of the cricket eleven and captain of the rugby fifteen. Professor Lowe’s conception of the old-fashioned public ...”