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“... the flat or over the sticks there is no quarter given in racing, none expected. Jockeys may be the best of friends in the weighing-room – though the most successful are often loners – but once under starter’s orders it is every man for himself. No room for the amateur, no room for any but the most hardened, mentally and ...”

“... exercises we turn to the merry snobberies of Kenya in Tennis and the Masai. In this farce-novel, Nicholas Best deliberately imitates Evelyn Waugh, but he is less serious, more racist in an unthinking, harmless way. Most of the action is set in Haggard Hall, a gruesome Kenya-British prep-school, multi-racial in intent – for the houses are called ...”

“... In the manuscript of her lecture, a cancelled sentence names the missing; first on her list is Nicholas Moore. Not just the publishers, but pretty much everything else had failed for Moore. The son of the Cambridge philosopher G.E. Moore, he had begun to publish poems in his teens. Though his father had sounded out the Hogarth Press, ...”

“... Henry Moore was attracted by the idea of monumentality. He tried hard, but with limited success, to find ways of incorporating his sculpture into modern buildings. He also had the attractive idea of locating some of his statues in remote settings, following the example of his friend the late Sir William Keswick, who placed four of Moore’s sculptures, as well as one by Rodin and one by Epstein, in the wild landscape of the estate he owned in south-west Scotland ...”

“... if I should tell him. He might find it interesting. This would depend on whether he’d had Nicholas Spice in mind when he invented Nicholas Spare, an odious music critic whom the nice characters in An Equal Music loathe. I decided to avoid the subject of Nicholas Spare. Instead we ...”

“... perspective and some kind of narrative content into avant-garde Parisian painting, and in the best of his pictures of this time perspective can even be said to become part of the narrative. In The Window a young woman, perched on a window seat, stares in terror at someone – at us – entering the room, that is, looking into the picture. The lines of the ...”

“... was not helped by the ‘modernist’ decor. The architects, Hobsbawm wrote, ‘did their level best to make the stark interior resemble a station waiting room’, although its severity was relieved by paintings, drawings, etchings – and chessboards. To make matters worse the menus, also designed by Samuel, were eclectic, part East End Jewish, part ...”

“... organised by the president of the French Senate.Three paintings in this last room – perhaps the best ones there – are by Piero di Cosimo and in subject, style and technique are unrelated to anything by Botticelli. We can only suspect that the Italian institutions which felt unable to yield the Botticellis that had been requested offered these paintings ...”

“... when Lincoln began his political career in the Illinois state legislature, slavery was a topic best avoided. Between 1790 and 1830, even as the Northern states embraced gradual abolition, the number of slaves in the United States increased from 700,000 to two million. The old consensus, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, that slavery was an unfortunate ...”

“... The last word of the reissue of Mr Nicholas, Thomas Hinde’s exquisitely glum and fearingly funny novel of 1952, is probably a misprint. At least, it is minutely different from the last word in the Penguin book in 1962, the issue which brought Hinde’s consummate first novel to an even more widely appreciative public ...”

“... the Japanese Imperial Army in 1937. And the third, described by William Shirer, and quoted by Lynn Nicholas, is about the Germans in Vienna after the Anschluss in 1938. It is probably right to conclude from these and many other examples that looting is as natural to human beings as raping and killing. In the state of nature, people show their strength by ...”

“... she published. Carson began writing very early. At the age of ten she wrote war stories for St Nicholas, the best children’s magazine of its day; later, she won a scholarship to read English at Pennsylvania College for Women. There, however, she switched to science, under the influence of a brilliant biology ...”

“... and determined to do as much good for Russia as they were capable of. But their deification – Nicholas will probably be canonised before the year is out – is also absurd: the Romanovs were in general inept, remote, narrow-minded, anti-semitic, intolerant, repressive and irresponsible. While Russian revisionist history of the last decade has finally ...”

“... paintings in the National Gallery, The Virgin and Child with Two Angels (c.1476), which may be the best preserved of all of the paintings attributed to Verrocchio, is regarded by Andrea De Marchi, a co-curator of the Palazzo Strozzi exhibition, as ‘probably one of the five most important paintings produced in Florence in the 15th century’. He baptises it ...”

“... Nicholas Mosley’s parents, Cynthia Curzon and Oswald Mosley, were married in the Chapel Royal, St James’s on 11 May 1920: ‘Cimmie’s wedding dress had a design of green leaves in it, in defiance of a superstition that green at a wedding was unlucky: there was also a superstition that it was unlucky to be married in May ...”