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“... How bad was it? In a way it was worse than a defeat, because to be defeated, an army and its masters must understand the nature of the conflict they are fighting. Britain never did understand, and now we would rather not think about it. The troops are home from a campaign that lasted 13 years, including Iraq in the middle. They are coming home from their ...”

“... In war, the spiritual anarchy of the great general confronts the physical anarchy of its facts and masters them. Montgomery had that anarchic power. And his company commander, together with a thousand other dutiful servants of the system, emphatically did not. Where did it come from? There seems little doubt – Montgomery himself did not doubt the explanation ...”

“... this picture. Flaubert​ wrote that ‘the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the history of Alexander the Great – everything depends on the execution.’ Artists had always known this, of course: Géricault did a painting called Twenty-Four Horses in Rear View (1813-14), three rows of eight (plus a twenty-fifth which has disobediently turned to face ...”

“... demanded to be satisfied by a greater precision in the assignment of monuments to periods and to masters. It is generally agreed that it was Winckelmann who gave the study of ancient art this impulse. It is true that those who turn to his Geschichte of 1764 will be disappointed if they expect the shedding of antiquarian ballast in favour of a clear sequence ...”

“... orgasmically by cream from a kolkhoz’s milk separator. A strange and electric painting by Alexander Deineka from 1926 – my examples cluster in the late 1920s, but the difference between 1926 and 1928 is already enormous – entitled Construction of New Workshops. And, fourth, the other pivotal space in the show, in painful tension with Memorial: the ...”

“... looking at light as it is. Instead, they automatically imported the illumination of the old masters, with Dutch, Italian or Spanish light unthinkingly transplanted into Parisian scenes. But Dutch light, governed as it is by the proximity of the sea, of canals and rising mists, then filtered through narrow sash windows with small square panes, was ...”

“... youthful delinquency but knowing that they would one day be sworn in as respectable tradesmen and masters. Maus, however, goes further, contending that Hal has all the cake and eats it: ‘the advantages of land and the advantages of chattels, the advantages of being an elder son and the advantages of being a younger son, the advantages of being a father and ...”

“... of the most remarkable products of Counter-Reformation energy. The Jesuits have always been past masters at self-presentation – an aspect of their mission to communicate the Christian message as effectively as possible. Not least is the hagiographical narrative shaping the life of Loyola himself, a central moment of which was a personal disaster in ...”

“... five days into two separate congresses, because it proved impossible to bridge the divide between masters and journeymen.Liberals​ revered parliaments and looked with disgust on the clubs and assemblies of the radicals which seemed to them to parody the sublime procedural culture of properly elected and constituted chambers. Even more alarming, from the ...”

“... Russia had been reconstituted from the ruins of the Soviet Union, the Russian Vice-President, Alexander Rutskoi, wrote in tones of patriotic despair about the queues for Moscow’s first McDonald’s, on Pushkin Square: the death of his country’s culture was taking place in the square named after its most famous poet. That people, not all of them ...”

“... a research institute under Abel Aganbegyan’s National Institute of the Economy. Others included Alexander Shokhin, who had been economic adviser to Eduard Shevardnadze while the latter was foreign minister; Anatoly Chubais, economic adviser to Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of St Petersburg; Konstantin Kagalovsky, who set up an Institute of the Market with ...”

“... for new political figures who burst brightly on the scene was: ‘Don’t be a Kerensky!’ Alexander Kerensky was the leader of the February Revolution in 1917 and briefly the darling of the democratic world until the Bolsheviks consigned him to the dustbin of history nine months later. He spent the last 53 years of his life eking out a living as a ...”

“... stars Russia’s favourite actor/film-maker Nikita Mikhalkov, an ardent monarchist who plays Alexander III in his own patriotic blockbuster, The Barber of Siberia. Mikhalkov is a middlebrow figure, but higher up the scale, Alexander Sokurov, the country’s leading art-film director, reproduces much the same ...”

“... Bruno’s development of the ancient ‘Art of Memory’. Another figure at James’s court, Alexander Dickson, was the foremost supporter of Bruno in Britain. The attraction of Masonic ritual and sodality for Scots of the higher classes was enhanced by the exceptional prestige of architecture in the 17th century. ‘The concepts of the Vitruvian ...”

“... and low-level managers to build the rudiments of a public administration. Angola’s colonial masters had kept the population in a state of helplessness; poorer Portuguese in this settler colony had done the jobs performed by Africans in other European possessions. Eighty-five per cent of Angolans were illiterate at independence; there was almost nothing ...”