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“... Simon​ de Pury, assisted by ‘a regular contributor to Vanity Fair’, has written a book about his ascent to the top of the art world: the auctions he conducted, the deals he struck, the parties he attended. It resembles a board game, with smaller parts assigned to the ‘hedge fund overlord’, the ‘polo-playing playboy millionaire’, the ‘James Bond of the Russian oligarchy’, the ‘French luxury goods tycoon’ (also appearing as the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king ...”

“... Nearer home, the continued intractability of the Northern Ireland conflict has led Simon Jenkins, in the Spectator, to condemn the current initiative by the British and Irish Governments to hold new talks on the province for its ‘centralism’. Instead, Jenkins offers the prospect of devolution to ethnic enclaves, the Catholic ones being ...”

“... and used Francesco Maria Piave as a mere versifying dogsbody. Verdi and Hugo shared a love of ‘strong situations’, but Rigoletto attains a stripped-down tragic clarity that makes Le Roi s’amuse seem little more than bombast. Verdi’s historical sense was general and profound rather than detailed. That is its strength: the picturesque and ...”

“... the grassland to trot just ahead of our jeep. Listed as rare (worse than ‘endangered’) in the Simon and Schuster Guide to Mammals, they were in imminent danger of becoming rarer: bewitched by the headlights, they would not get out of the way, and often we had to brake to avoid hitting them. When we finally reached the tranca, the barrier that each ...”

“... and nowhere to return to, the past wiped out by horror, the future a terrifying unknown. While the Simon family in Heimat go peacefully about their lives, Isidor, one of Primo Levi’s partisans, is watching the SS, ‘boys themselves, only a little older than he, clubbing his father, mother and sister to death’, and apparently ‘having fun’. Heimat and ...”

“... introduces his characters with two (or even three) slack adjectives. On one page we meet a ‘strong and handsome’ Simon O’Donnell, a ‘snarling, aggressive, straight-backed’ Geoff Lawson, a ‘swift hostile Craig McDermott’, a ‘wicked old Jeff Thomson’, a ‘gritty, youthful Doug Walters’ and a ...”

“... England to wed a bride in whom he had absolutely no interest, but despite his reluctance he had a strong sense of his responsibilities to the empire he would inherit. One of his closest advisers, Ruy Gómez, summed up the situation: Philip, he wrote, ‘understands that this marriage was effected not for the flesh but for the restoration of this realm, and ...”

“... Richet and Paul Portier in 1902. Von Pirquet won. The linking evidence has turned out to be very strong. And although Nobel Prizes were awarded to Behring (in 1901) and Richet (in 1913) for their immunological researches, their terms, unlike ‘allergy’, remained scientific and technical. What makes a malady modern? Some define themselves as such because ...”

“... in a sick-room, always putting their own interests last. Since they’re not churchy, their strong spirituality only finds expression in snatched moments when they’re alone: gardening or playing the piano. The Duchy dies in the opening scene in All Change, and it’s the best thing in the book: Rachel found a bottle of Malvern water in the ...”

“... politics and population. But what of the navy and the world beyond Britain? Here Rodger takes a strong and contentious line. Before 1815, he insists, the navy was not primarily an engine of expanding British empire and aggression. Its main raison d’être was defensive, and it was powered more than anything else by fear, and indirectly by ...”

“... their own – were largely restricted to a life of service to others. They enjoyed a particularly strong reputation as skilled craftsmen – clockmakers, printers, armourers – and travelled across Europe as journeymen. German merchants and financiers acquired huge power for themselves: the Welser family of Augsburg, bankers to the Habsburgs, ruled what is ...”

“... the places they had seen.Dalrymple calls all this the ‘Indosphere’, attributing the coinage to Simon Sebag Montefiore (elsewhere it is attributed to Professor James Matisoff, a celebrated coiner of neologisms). But however we wish to describe it, the phenomenon is achieved, if not quite without firing a shot, at least without the deployment of huge armies ...”

“... many times over, in the town where I grew up. Those engines were new in the 1970s. Unlike Simon Bradley I lack the trainspotter’s enthusiasm for locomotives, and I’ve had some horrible journeys on that train. But the theatrical grandeur of its arrival always alters my sense of my surroundings, as if a door had opened, offering a glimpse of an ...”

“... conditions – conditions which have now disappeared. We have had the woe-is-England vapourings of Simon Heffer and the rushed observations of Andrew Marr. An academic industry has flourished. Now both Weight and Robert Colls have written requiems for the old Britishness which are also ruminations on a new, more democratic England. Britannia, for so long a ...”

“... the broadcasting licence of Radio Caracas Televisión, forcing it off the air and prompting a strong rebuke from Human Rights Watch and the US State Department. In subsequent years, Chávez came to adopt all the attributes political scientists associate with authoritarianism. He sacrificed institutional checks and balances for political ...”