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“... on an unprecedented scale is vividly illustrated in The Great Purges, which contains some of David King’s collection of contemporary photographs, together with a commentary by Isaac Deutscher: ‘In presenting these scenes, I had to reconstruct a nightmare.’ We must hope that, for a majority or Russians, their dreams have become pleasanter: but we do ...”

“... wrote. Stravinsky of course remained immune – but that’s another story. The first volume of David Nice’s Prokofiev biography stops when the 44-year-old composer settles in Moscow with his Spanish wife, Lina, and two young sons at the end of 1935. But it describes in detail the eight preceding years, during which Prokofiev lived and worked as a ...”

“... the mendacity or hypocrisy of a public man who says one thing and privately does another. In 2007, David Runciman devoted his Carlyle Lectures at Oxford to the subject of hypocrisy – not hypocrisy in general, but hypocrisy in politics. It is a wonderful topic. Everyone knows that politics is partly a matter of ritual and ceremony, deception and ...”

“... waiters, until it becomes their proper nature. It is the same with writers and artists. Byron or David or Robert Lowell cannot slink off and become their ordinary selves in the intervals of being poets and painters and men of the age. Greta Garbo is always Greta Garbo, once she has found the part. But there is quite a different category of actor, as of ...”

“... the Final Solution was intentionally such that very few records of essential decisions were kept; David Irving may even be formally right in his assertion that there is no written document to link Hitler himself with the Final Solution until October 1943; and the same absence or confusion in the written record has even been taken as evidence that the whole ...”

“... has it, was brought to him mid-set). ‘At the peak of its popularity in the 16th century,’ David Berry writes in his history of tennis, ‘Paris alone had 250 courts, including one at the Louvre and another at Versailles, the latter of which was occupied in the revolution of 1789 by the Third Estate as a symbolic protest at the elitist nature of this ...”

“... An interesting section is devoted to the mass of anti-aristocratic pornography which appeared in France in the years preceding the Revolution. ‘If the philosophes had an influence on the events that brought about the revolution, so had the writers of bawdy and obscene chroniques scandaleuses,’ Wagner asserts. Certainly a work like Bordel national sous ...”

“... finance were inextricably linked. But as a result of the spiralling costs of the wars against France, and because of Parliament’s desire to keep a tight grip on the Army, the control of military finance was taken over by the House of Commons, and from 1697, the new king, William III, was paid an annual sum by Parliament, to cover his own royal ...”

“... rescued her from the unwelcome attentions of a soi-disant army captain, and eloped with her to France. On their return, Sheridan fought two duels on Eliza’s account; once married, the couple relied on Sheridan’s income as a theatre manager (he bought a controlling interest in the Drury Lane Theatre at the age of 25), and his earnings from the three ...”

“... in the writings of Voltaire and Rousseau. He turned 15 a few days after the Revolutionists in France renounced all seigneurial privileges; he would remain all his life the sort of springtime radical who does not let you forget the coincidence. That bliss was meant for him; he took its betrayal personally. A natural pedant with an acquired aptitude for ...”

“... as I write, talk of a second wave has receded. The first wave is enough to be getting on with. France, a centre-right government which once tried to pass for a centre-left one, tried to hold the line for longer than its equivalents in Italy or Spain. But once the line could no longer be held, it moved to an all-out war footing. For now the war is all there ...”

“... thought at one point it was near Pakistan. It’s actually kind of in the middle of Europe between France and Germany and somewhere else. OK, I’m still not 100 per cent sure. I went by plane for Christ’s sake’) but taught him a lot about how to fill dead airtime; then local commercial radio, before he made it to Capital Radio and the big time. Even at ...”

“... worse outcomes than other places. Mixed-payment, less centralised systems do better (Australia, France). We should probably do more of what they do. There’s the what. But how? Is it a question of electing politicians who say they’ll fix it? That seems unlikely: it hasn’t worked so far, and it’s hard for politicians to get elected while challenging ...”

“... of Days (1914). On the outbreak of war he managed to get himself attached to the staff of Sir David Henderson, then commanding the Royal Flying Corps, and after some difficulty in donning his uniform (‘Six people endeavoured to put on my puttees; none of them were entirely successful, except finally in the evening. Sir ...”

“... The sculptor​ David Nash has lived and worked in Snowdonia for half a century, and the exhibition of his work currently on view at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff (until 1 September) is a tribute to his time in the region. Born in Surrey in 1945, he moved to the once flourishing slate-mining town of Blaenau Ffestiniog in 1967, the year he left Kingston School of Art ...”