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“... English that’s reminiscent of Hemingway’s way of suggesting spoken Spanish in For Whom the Bell Tolls, with all his ‘thous’ and ‘thees’. Everything is exactly described and faultlessly detailed, just as it is in the novels that precede and follow it, The Girl at the Lion d’Or (1989) and Charlotte Gray (1998), which extend the territory of ...”

“... lies rather in his sly portrayal of the squad’s commanding officer as Napoleon. As the historian David Todd has argued, this foreign policy disaster exposed the hollowness of the emperor’s promises to promote the trade and influence of France throughout the world. After Napoleon’s overthrow in 1870 and death in exile at Chislehurst in Kent, the fate of ...”

“... or at least its dedicated mourner. He has written a polemic against John Major’s Government and David Owen, the EU mediator in the remains of Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995, for their connivance in the ferocious dismantling of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He is keen on Major’s New Labour successors, and confident that Tony Blair’s support for the Milosevic ...”

“... making it the third most expensive work by a living artist, after Jeff Koons’s Rabbit and David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist. The buyer, Vignesh Sundaresan, called it a ‘significant piece of art history’. Sundaresan doesn’t own the copyright to Everydays. All he bought was a non-fungible token (NFT): a collection of data stored using ...”

“... from 1923, set up a studio with Yanko Varda, and became close friends with Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Virginia and Leonard Woolf, all of whom spent time in Cassis during those years. Through Max Ernst, a friend of Boué’s, he met the Surrealist poets and painters, and with Herbert Read and David Gascoyne, introduced ...”

“... David Kohn opens his monumental Darwinian Heritage with a deftly-delivered kick, observing that a study of the wider institutional culture of Darwin’s day seems to be ‘beyond the present ken of historians of 19th-century biology’. It’s a well-aimed blow. Little of the Darwin industry’s capital has been spent on exploring evolution in its social context ...”

“... was reticent and barely spoke, but became friends with a fellow student (and fellow photographer), David Armstrong. The camera became a solution to the problems of childhood, of growing up, of what was happening to her now – a way of proving her experiences were real.After leaving Satya, she moved into a flatshare with Armstrong in Boston. Her luminous ...”

“... countless critical treatises, and even apart from his still oddly scandalous paintings at which, David Ellis reports, 13,000 visitors to London’s Warren Gallery gawked in the early summer of 1929, he was a figure of extraordinary fascination, even during his lifetime. Paradoxically, then, to contemplate works by the author of that famous critical maxim ...”

“... persistent failure to draw their blackout curtains perhaps) and one night, having had to ring the bell and remonstrate yet again, Joe burst out: ‘I’d like to give them a right kick up the arse.’ This wasn’t like Joe at all and turned into a family joke, and a useful one too, as Dad never swore, so to give somebody a kick up the arse became known ...”

“... considered sinful in their time: they are Rahab the harlot, Bathsheba who was tempting to King David, Tamar who coaxed her father-in-law – and even Ruth, who crept under the bedclothes of Boaz, her kinsman. Does not this suggest that Matthew wanted to show that Mary was descended from ‘sinners’? This is far-fetched. We are not convinced that Matthew ...”

“... of man from that other one I might have been had I remained in Libya; and the hours after seeing David with the Head of Goliath in the Galleria Borghese, searching for shade and finding a place to rest under a pine on a green beside the Sant’Andrea al Quirinale – all seemed to fold together and collapse like a concertina of days made of the same ...”

“... the footstool and candelabra in the unfinished portrait of Madame Récamier when he was a pupil in David’s studio). The objects represented here can be traced from old inventories; indeed, an academic study exists devoted solely to Ingres’s eloquent mantelpieces. He shows not the slightest hint of embarrassment about the material expression of power ...”

“... into public hands and back again. The telephone was invented in March 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell. Queen Victoria witnessed a demonstration of the new device on 14 January 1878. On 7 April 1882, the Aberdeen Weekly Journal reported that the establishment of a rudimentary telephone system in London had ‘justified the most sanguine expectations of its ...”

“... projects in the areas of foreign policy, domestic policy and public building) describe similar bell curves … Other poleis, with different constitutional histories, would manifest very different “capacity curves” over the same period.’ This is the essence of Ober’s case: Athens did well when democracy did well, and democracy doing well was the ...”

“... relations with ITN,’ concludes Ingham, ‘were much easier. I got on extremely well with Sir David Nicholas and Sir Alastair Burnet and Sue Tinson.’ No wonder. Burnet was a legendary Thatcher-worshipper and Sue Tinson was once a candidate for the job of Head of Information at Tory Central Office. On page 366, Sir Bernard declares his hatred for ‘the ...”