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“... Biggs ambles from a Brixton boyhood into petty thieving and friendship with big-timer Bruce Reynolds, who asks him to make one for the big job because he can produce a bent train-driver: ‘I knew before the meeting that there were qualms about my being included on the job, because I was such an unlucky thief; even Bruce was worried. Jobs I had done ...”

“... instalments, but it didn’t matter: I read and reread the piece that summer. Sharply written by Michael Watts, it covered the aftermath of the Pistols’ split at the end of a disastrous American tour; the fitful struggle to make a Sex Pistols movie; McLaren’s dalliance with managing the Slits; the fatal stabbing of Nancy Spungen, holed up with Sid ...”

“... the most sympathetic and beautiful portraits of blacks ever made by Europeans. One of these is Reynolds’s incomplete and undated study of a young black man listening (it seems) to the winds that disturb the sky behind him, a painting long believed to be a portrait of Dr Johnson’s beloved black servant, Frank Barber. Houdon’s radiant patinated plaster ...”

“... and suchlike, and would not be caught dead ranking Blake as a painter and draughtsman against Reynolds or Fuseli or even his older contemporary Goya. (The Black Paintings and The Book of Urizen seem to me to inhabit comparable worlds.) But Blake himself, we know, would have understood and sympathised immediately with Bloom’s terms, if not his ...”

“... in practice, and in any case an immense task of sorting, translating, and analysing lies ahead. Michael Howard, for instance, in a characteristically crisp introduction to The Quest for Stability, asks the basic question whether at the end of the Second World War Stalin actually aspired to global hegemony. This, he says, ‘we shall be able to tell only ...”

“... The​ 1996 film Michael Collins shows a badly wounded James Connolly being carried on a stretcher to a chair in Kilmainham Gaol, to which he is tied before being shot by a British firing squad. Connolly was one of the fifteen rebel leaders executed in May 1916 for their part in the Easter Rising, when at least 1200 rebels battled the British forces in Dublin for six days with the aim of establishing an Irish republic ...”

“... here, because studies in Romanticism can take advantage of exactly the breakdown in traditional, Reynolds-like arrangements that ‘Romantic’ figures sought. Neutrality of tone, orthodox narrative, even biography, simply conceived – these will never find their object, when looking at, and estimating, Romantic questions. Take Keats. What would Keats have ...”

“... architecture at the Royal Academy, on the post-professional side. The careers Dorothy Stroud and Michael Wilson describe in their new biographies of Soane and Kent illustrate the division. James Gibbs had a more complete architectural education – in Rome – than any of his British contemporaries. He was a Catholic, and his career suffered because of ...”

“... defendant and Gaitskell as Treasury prosecutor. No one who has served in a Cabinet (including Mr Michael Heseltine today) would fail to recognise the reality of the problem and, given the political sensitivity of the National Health Service in the Labour Party (or of defence in the Conservative Party), its explosive potential. Bevan first fought a successful ...”

“... tradition of 18th-century theory, as produced by Shaftesbury, Jonathan Richardson and Sir Joshua Reynolds. He can also be argued to have challenged, more directly than anyone else, the supremacy of history painting in the hierarchy of genres adhered to by that official theory. He was always willing to turn his hand to history painting, in his version of the ...”

“... her brother, with his poor singing voice, ‘murdering’ Grétry – the word is the Irish tenor Michael Kelly’s – and we witness a number of total theatrical flops, which have always provided good copy for the annalist. Of course, it is all very much in the anecdotal line. Is it any the worse for that? Ms Kelly is not writing for a specialist ...”

“... subject comes up all over the place. Even in élite platoons some sections are better than others. Michael Howard (‘Churchill and the First World War’), F.H. Hinsley (... and the Use of Special Intelligence), R.V. Jones, the happy beam-hunter of 1940 and premier intelligencer thereafter (... and Science), Norman Rose (and Zionism) and Roy Jenkins (the ...”

“... with any taste for the visual arts could call it to mind. Northcote, who had been a pupil of Reynolds and remembered the conversation of Reynolds’s friends, reported that Garrick used to say of this picture ‘that the Saint resembled a satyr, and that the child was like a monkey’. But, Northcote added, ‘there is ...”

“... undistracted by ambition. Boorman may be the most inspired and wayward of English directors since Michael Powell.Not that Powell would have attempted Point Blank. Not that anyone in 1967 had reason to think that a young Englishman raised on the leafy edges of south London (Carshalton, and later Shepperton) would know how to go to Los Angeles (and San ...”

“... and does not want to go away, water is central to visions of the dry land. When the historian Michael Cathcart, then a student, asked a university research committee for a Land Rover to do ‘fieldwork’, he was asked by those who thought the vehicle should be used for more scientific purposes: ‘What are you collecting?’ ‘Adjectives,’ Cathcart ...”