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“... still bandaged, back into the line; he was captured, sentenced to death, and finally released into France. Everything that he has to say is interesting, whether about how much he was paid (he’d expected nothing) and what he did with it (gave it to the war effort, there being nothing to spend it on), or about the horrors of battle. He describes unforgettably ...”

“... hero’s refusal to meet his mother at a victory dinner; the arm’s-length relations with his son David, whom he temporarily disinherited after his divorce (the first in the family); the decision to cut his brother Brian’s wedding and go to a football match instead; and other incidents showing a perverse insensitivity. The Princesse de Merode, whose chateau ...”

“... from atom to hydrogen bomb – in the US, 1945, 1952; Russia, 1949, 1953; Britain, 1952, 1957; France, 1960, 1968.) The atomic bomb, like the war itself, is now history, no longer a living experience. Even in Hiroshima and Nagasaki ‘there now were more and more children who did not know who dropped the bomb, or when; who were not worried about political ...”

“... the 17th century that would challenge what she and her friends saw as the Tory version supplied by David Hume. The first volume was an immediate bestseller when it appeared in 1763, and so to a lesser extent were its four successors which were all published before 1773. Insisting on and obtaining what was then the quite extraordinary sum of £1000 per ...”

“... even married her Antony a good few times. The early stages of European portraiture began, the late David Piper suggested in his 1992 study, The English Face, with tomb-effigies in the 12th century. Neither beauty nor individuality were the point of these monuments in death to rank, wealth and piety. None of these portraits in stone looks like anyone I have ...”

“... has come to a head faster than expected as a result of the Scottish independence referendum and David Cameron’s political ambition. Labour has (or had) an electoral interest in keeping Scotland in the Union. The Conservatives do not. Their loyalty to the United Kingdom is sentimental, not electoral. The practical argument against Scottish independence was ...”

“... of US debt. The deal on offer to the Republicans was described by the conservative commentator David Brooks as ‘the deal of the century’, offering ‘trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred billion dollars of revenue increases’: A normal Republican Party would seize the opportunity to put a long-term limit on the growth ...”

“... twinklers of an hour, provoke my rage’) for Pope himself. Gerrard follows Howard Weinbrot and David Fairer in championing Hill’s biblical odes The Creation (1720) and The Judgment Day (1721) as significant expositions of the sublime in an age addicted to correctness; but the argument isn’t likely to persuade readers confronted by lines as poor as the ...”

“... the French Ambassador. The patriotic hero, it turned out, had venally conspired with foreigners. David Hume, who had earlier mocked the Sidney cult, found it ‘amusing to observe the general and I may say national rage’. Shortly after the exposure of Sidney, John Wilkes – in the House of Commons, of all places – extolled Cromwell’s ...”

“... prince, has been slipping. The woman modern scholarship gives us has been neatly summed up by David Cannadine: ‘A workaday regnant queen, shorn of her glitter and her gold, her glamour and her greatness, with a false face, a disturbed psyche, a heart of stone, a barren womb and feet of clay; and as such a woman trying to do a man’s job, but not always ...”

“... shall stand/With its unshaken head, till time’s last sand.’ This last phrase was borrowed by David Kynaston for the title of his captivating history of the bank.* The exit of the deputy governor remained unequalled for drama until the resignation of another deputy governor during the Barings crash three centuries later, after a Sunday tabloid reported ...”

“... literary interests to years of clerical drudgery; both wrote war despatches; both travelled in France; both participated in revolutionary events (1848,17 June 1953) and then worked for repressive regimes; they had the same number of children and the same kind of wife. Last but not least, they said the same things, literally; but this is less surprising in ...”

“... for example, or Maureen Forrester – and then follow this by listening to a countertenor, David Daniels, for example, or Andreas Scholl, or Iestyn Davies (or go on YouTube and listen to a recording of the last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, who died in 1922, singing the Bach-Gounod ‘Ave Maria’, with what Feldman called a vibrato that is ‘often ...”

“... him? Son. A few years ago, when I asked my father why he wasn’t going to the house in south-west France where he had for several summers spent a few weeks, his answer sounded straightforward. ‘Too far from Figeac,’ he said. Too far from Figeac? I asked. The house was a distance from the town in the Lot with its baker and café, this was true, but in his ...”

“... like this – Wilfred Owen’s was not dissimilar: away to Oxfordshire, away teaching in France long before enlistment – is that they exacerbate sibling tensions, intolerance, even dislike. Given the hopelessly misdated or undated state of Gurney archives at the time he was writing his book, Michael Hurd’s The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney (1978), the ...”