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“... of what seems to have been a much happier experience of language. Between tales from Finland’s national epic, the Kalevala, and glugs of Koskenkorva vodka, Pastor Koskela, a Lutheran and a nationalist, boasts of the spontaneity of the Finnish tongue: ‘The sounds of our language were around us, in nature, in the woods, in the pull of the sea, in the ...”

“... corners in Europe if you happen to be unaccompanied and of the wrong religion. I assume it’s an adaptation of some Gerald Seymour novel and reach over to turn the radio off. Then I recognise the voice – it’s John Humphrys on Today. I concentrate. On the Falls, apparently, men with hard, cold eyes used to stare ...”

“... The highly practical Hellenistic solution to Britain’s insatiable Churchill/Finest Hour cravings would have been to establish a regular cult, with its own dedicated priests, rituals and sanctuaries. Facing a brazen engraving of the famously pugnacious 1941 Karsh photograph, surrounded by appropriate symbols or even original relics of Spitfires, Sten guns, Home Guard pikes and Montecristo cigars, listening to quadrophonic recordings of the major speeches in His own voice, peering into side-chapels dedicated to His companions (Beaverbrook, Birkenhead, Bracken), the average gent thrown into despair by the latest debacle of the British economy could swiftly revive his flagging spirits ...”

“... painted. It would probably only have taken a couple of sessions for Batoni to get the sitter’s face onto canvas – the 12 he gave David Garrick were unusual. He made no preliminary drawings; when it came to finishing the figure a stand-in could take up the chosen position, usually a variation on a settled range of ...”

“... to conceal an inconvenient pregnancy and had recently given birth to the Duke of Devonshire’s illegitimate daughter in a seedy boarding-house in Vietri. Having left the baby with a wet nurse, she embarked on a liaison with the Russian ambassador. Her standing in Neapolitan society was, at best, shaky. The English expatriates in Italy in the 1780s were a ...”

“... and completeness of the Soviet meltdown. It was, for example, disconcerting to find that one’s own arguments about the future of Germany proved in retrospect to have been sincere and honest when one had for so long assumed them to be hypocritical. To hold that West Germany could both remain a full member of Nato and ...”

“... whose paintings would not have surprised, although they would have delighted, Veronese, Rubens or Reynolds. Delaroche’s picture presents Robert Rosenblum with ‘the immediate illusion of a theatrical tableau enacted by costumed players in a crystal-clear space’. It was painted for – one might say took place at ...”

“... Genius,’ Wordsworth said; perhaps predictably, since his notion of poetry differed from Dryden’s as much as Romantic ‘imagination’ differed from Augustan ‘wit’. But here is Dr Johnson: ‘to write con amore … was … no part of his character.’ Verse starved of parental love may well have problems attracting affection later. T.S. Eliot took a ...”

“... Tasmania’s prodigal son, Peter Conrad, suggested recently that his island-state had ‘unwritten its own history’ in accordance with ‘a self-protective incuriosity about origins’. Tasmania’s origins lay in an act of genocidal conquest and a penal experiment, both of which were so recent and so omnipresent in their effect as to make recollection intolerable ...”

“... be more at odds with the no-nonsense common sense of the ordinary man or woman? We have become so accustomed to this usage that it is something of a shock to be reminded by Sophia Rosenfeld that ‘common sense’ once had a very different set of political connotations, and that 200 years ago asserting a belief in ordinary people’...”

“... of the millennium in which the championship was a two-horse race – and a very close race, so that there may never be a consensus lasting more than fifty years as to which of them was the winner. Nevertheless, there is a clear distinction in their greatness, one relating purely to its nature, not its degree. It’s ...”

“... went to France in June 1915 as one of the ‘First Hundred Thousand’, as the men of Kitchener’s New Army became known. At first he reacted to the battlefield with curiosity and fascination rather than fear, as he described in letters to an elder brother, my grandfather, Basil Hastings, who was medically unfit for active service: 23 June 1915 Dear ...”

“... vivant of the anti-Communist crusade. Especially in view of the fact that but for the Red Army’s achievement in pinning down the majority of German divisions on the Eastern Front, a successful invasion of Western Europe would have been impossible. But the D-Day celebrations revealed an intriguing gap in the mythology of the Cold War. It could hardly be ...”

“... The immediate inspiration for ‘Shooting Niagara: and After?’ was the threat of Disraeli’s Reform Act, which would double the number of adult males entitled to vote, and thus, as Carlyle saw it, unleash untold ‘new supplies of blockheadism, gullibility, bribability, [and] amenability to beer and balderdash’: look at America, the beleaguered Sage ...”

“... to A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701-1800 apart from Friedrich Noack’s three volumes (1907-27) listing all the Germans in Rome, from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. The Dictionary is the brain-child of Sir Brinsley Ford, a collector of 17th and 18th-century art, a patron of living British painters, and in many ways a ...”