“... many virtues of Ghosh’s book is its focus on Asia rather than the nations on either side of the North Atlantic. ‘Asia’s centrality to global warming rests, in the first instance, upon numbers,’ he writes. ‘The great majority of potential victims are in Asia.’ He describes the threats they face in stark terms: 125 million people in India and ...”

“... Provisionals, who believed that, without violence, it was impossible to defend Catholics in the North and keep up the struggle against the British with any effectiveness. Another issue was sectarianism. The old IRA leadership had long opposed it. Protestant and Catholic workers, they believed, should unite in a class struggle against the imperialist British ...”

“... house key to collect the electric charge, which in a thunderstorm in June 1752, in a field just north of Philadelphia, irrefutably showed the connection between lightning and electricity.Yet, perhaps because of his very variousness, Franklin’s biographers often dismiss these devices and discoveries as a string of hobbies, so many diversions from his ...”

“... they were not, as a rule, killed there. A cow typically began its life in Texas; was first herded north to the Plains; then herded eastwards (sometimes by rail), often to be better fed and cared for, however briefly, near a major centre of slaughter – almost always Chicago. Unlike the buffaloes, cattle were a marketable commodity. At the same time a ...”

“... by a colleague, as resembling ‘Hamlet’s indecisive younger brother’, and that, in the North of this country, ‘playing Hamlet’ has meant falling into a wild rage. It is certainly no less necessary to see him as a murderer than as a paragon. Shakespeare’s tragedies often concern the humanity of a murderer, who may see things that speak to a ...”

“... ancient allies and enemies yawning together on platforms at Boulder, Colorado, or Grand Forks, North Dakota. ‘Prisoners of the Press Conference’, as Ann Charters captions them. Explainers of what is gone, apologists for what never happened. Literary stocks busking to sustain their market value, justify the next complimentary, two-seat air ticket. Corso ...”

“... so it was natural enough for reviewers to notice the fact of his youth. The awful Christopher North patted the young poet on the head, praising ‘a promising plant’ while deploring an ‘infantile vanity’ (‘I forgave you all the blame,/Musty Christopher;/I could not forgive the praise,/Fusty Christopher,’ Tennyson wrote in a wounded ...”

“... and as philosophers of social-scientific method. The comparison becomes almost a reflex in John Hall’s outstanding biography: ‘Gellner’s understanding and account of modern cognition were profoundly Weberian’; ‘No modern thinker has stood so close to Weber in insisting that our times must be disenchanted’; Gellner’s account is ‘Weberian ...”

“... using fMRI – notably, Semir Zeki – have pointed art studies in a significant new direction. John Onians and Barbara Maria Stafford, both art historians, certainly think so, though Neuroarthistory and Echo Objects argue the case in quite different ways. What might the far view be, from this new bend in the road? Suppose we could arrive at adequate ...”

“... this uncelebrated railway halt, navigates by revulsion. Starting on Tottenham Court Road, he heads north, always choosing the worst option when the path divides. ‘Who Ponder was and how he ended, the merciful God knows. Once upon a time it was a quagmire; now it is a swamp, biding its time … Here the city gives up the game.’ It wasn’t just Tebbit who ...”

“... In 1978 Terry Eagleton wrote an essay on John Bayley in the New Left Review. It is a ritual excoriation of that most tactful of ‘liberal humanist’ critics, punctuated with predictable sneers about ‘a view of life from the Oxford senior common room window’ and how Bayley’s criticism prizes a liberal disorder that depends on a conservative order ‘within which the gentleman may wear his art and opinions lightly ...”

“... permanently part of the United Kingdom is popular with the prosperous middle-class voters of North Down, or ‘the Gold Coast’ as it’s called. Surely they’ll back the No vote? But I’m not sure. My image for the Good Friday Agreement is a short, strong rubber band, the sort attached to a metal tent peg. Like one of those bands, it can stretch in ...”

“... that Zimbabwe’s road to independence has been neither a carbon copy of Kenyan capitalism nor, as John Saul and Basil Davidson inferred in the late Seventies, an inferior version of Frelimo-style socialism in neighbouring Mozambique. According to Ranger, the disparaging depictions of Zanu and its military wing Zanla were based on unavoidable ...”

“... he often quoted, and he himself became a stimulus. Agate was not a university man: he was a North Country cotton merchant and wartime army officer who had seen Sarah Bernhardt when he was 13. ‘Her acting,’ he said, ‘unveiled for me the ecstasy of the body and the torture of the mind.’ When he was 20, Agate went to Paris, to see the actress ...”

“... far from being aligned, these men were at loggerheads. Here interlopers like Matthew Cradock and John Fowke were joined with Lord Saye and Sale, Lord Brooke and the Earl of Warwick. Their policies entailed curtailing the power of the Directors and Governor by making them financially accountable, by increasing the control of the generality, by switching to ...”