“... were not, before people arrived, tracts of bents and heather and bog-cotton: they were jungles of broad-leaved trees and conifers. Valley bottoms in the American sierras were not necessarily, before the whites arrived, a tangle of woods and undergrowth: they were a mixture of copse and meadow managed by the tribes who lived there. The point should not be ...”

“... departments, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and among these appointees are shrewd, broad-minded and courteous men (they are inevitably men), eager to talk about their work and the monarch whom they serve. In 2007, I spent a few weeks talking at length to several of them. They were far from being detached and objective observers, but they ...”

“... brassy and vulgar, too proud of revealing that what the intellectuals really yearn for is broad public acclaim, financial success, and the perks, privileges and luxuries bestowed up to that time only on the high rollers in business, investment and entertainment. The book was always, in my view, persuasive and engaging; it has since been accepted as ...”

“... and brilliantly starched white shirt with narrow black stripes. A brown, green and gold tie in broad stripes, of stiff and hard imitation watered silk. The particulars neither solicit nor receive celebration, and the end is a return: ‘The crease is still sharp in the trousers.’ The clothes are ready for wearing on Sunday, and this is what they will ...”

“... The modes, finally, differ in respect of how persuasive they are; in this respect they cover a broad spectrum. Annas and Barnes highlight the differences among the modes, but they still show how all can be plausibly seen as expressions of a unified general attitude. They connect the modes with contemporary epistemological concerns, but they still preserve ...”

“... Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox when other officials in the Justice Department refused to obey Richard Nixon’s order. He deliberately turned his Senate hearings into ‘a discussion of judicial philosophy’, with the aim of exposing the modern heresies that had brought the Warren and Burger Courts to such jurisprudential absurdities as Roe v. Wade. He ...”

“... Refreshingly, Anderson doesn’t dwell on this personal side. He is more interested in two other broad aspects of the Lawrence story: first, his actual campaigns (Anderson is ‘a veteran war correspondent’ familiar with modern-day conflicts in the Middle East); and second, the broader context of those campaigns, which involves giving space to a number of ...”

“... into the charmed and the irritated, and as the book goes on, proceeding by way of loose themes and broad chronology, reasons for irritation multiply. Harris seems oddly incurious about how and why writing and art about weather changes from time to time. She has no organising argument and not much sense of history, so inevitably the book turns into a personal ...”

“... Copland. The following year her choreography for Oklahoma! revolutionised Broadway. The composer Richard Rodgers had just left his lyricist Lorenz Hart for Oscar Hammerstein II, and the new team realised that the usual dance razzmatazz wasn’t going to be right for a show about cowboys and farmers at the turn of the century. Before Rodeo, de Mille, who was ...”

“... at Shorty and Malcolm in their immaculate zoot-suits, long coats, baggy pants tight at the ankles, broad-brimmed hats with giant feathers. Ruth Carter, the costume designer for the movie, interviewed in By Any Means Necessary, says she had six suits for Malcolm but neither she nor Lee wanted the audience to start thinking: ‘Where’s he getting all these ...”

“... America’s entire policy towards the Middle East. American policy-makers were divided into two broad schools of thought, the even-handed school and the Israel-first school. The even-handed school, of which George Ball was a leading member, argued that America should not identify too closely or exclusively with Israel because this could jeopardise ...”

“... Edward Diestelkamp in giving equal credit for the building’s structure to the ironfounder Richard Turner as to its architect, Decimus Burton. The lives of the building’s inhabitants – plant and human – are glimpsed in short but informative chapters which describe the inception of the idea for such a building, its design, manufacture and ...”

“... The political divisions that mattered in the 1630s were not between an effete establishment and a broad-based opposition but within the government, where reasoned cases for and against foreign involvement turned not only on underlying commitments of principle or strategy but on finely balanced diplomatic calculation. Historians, as Stubbs acknowledges, have ...”

“... so as to get my bearings again. I say ‘unfairly’ because neither author aims to do anything as broad as Lopez, whose book combined an awareness of the region’s history with a naturalist’s knowledge of its ecology. Kavenna pursues the myth of Thule, and Davidson the imaginative allure the North has for artists and writers. Neither mentions Lopez ...”

“... what isn’t. As well as ‘locking on’, new offences include ‘tunnelling’ and the extremely broad category of ‘interference in key national infrastructure’, which in practice has meant arresting people disrupting ‘transport road infrastructure’. It has become easier to stop and search even where there are no specific grounds for suspicion. The ...”