“... problems of causation. Is there a collection of social or institutional preconditions which may be shown to account for it? If there is, then serious research needs to be done on Scottish government and society in the early 18th century, for the understanding of both of these remains limited. We ought also to be looking critically at the intellectual ...”

“... as it did a uniquely comprehensive monument to past greatness. Rhetoric, sentiment and panegyric may all have been eschewed (‘No flowers, by request,’ as Alfred Ainger put it), but it remained the DNB’s purpose ‘to do the state some service’ by ‘helping the present and future generations to realise more thoroughly than were otherwise possible the ...”

“... the implications of his decision are interesting. The grand question ‘what is art for?’ may elicit less revealing answers than the simple one: ‘where shall we put it?’ It was not just the scale and seriousness of Rothko’s paintings that made the restaurant an unsuitable place to hang them, for when a real chapel was built in Texas for another ...”

“... of the origin of visual art and of the function of its different forms, and was the inspiration of Richard Payne Knight’s Discourse on the Worship of Priapus. Like Haskell, he had the storyteller’s ability to ‘captivate’ his audience, and nothing could be more appropriate, in Haskell’s account of the life and adventures of this picaresque ...”

“... Greg Lindsay alone. Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s business school, may be a peculiar sort of Johnson, but Lindsay, a business journalist, is nonetheless his committed Boswell. A Boswell who, in search of his subject’s zeitgeist wisdom, once mounted a three-week exploration of ‘Airworld’ – as Kasarda calls it – by ...”

“... of the debates: ‘No props, notes, charts, diagrams or other writings or other tangible things may be brought into the debate by any candidate’; ‘The candidates may not ask each other direct questions, but may ask rhetorical questions’; ‘Except as provided in subparagraph ...”

“... of news creation and distribution. Like everything associated with him (including, one may predict, his imminent disappearance from the scene), it has happened very fast. He is 31 years old, and has been in full-time business three years. He was born in Washington DC, the offspring of ‘liberal’ parents: his father, as Matt recalls, was ‘one ...”

“... everywhere or total erasure. In such a mood your memory itself becomes a double agent, and you may be ready, like the hero of Orson Welles’s Mr Arkadin, to hire a private eye to explore your own past or, like the hero of Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas, to welcome the devil as your research assistant. You could also just read one of the ...”

“... to the present). The term ‘dinosaur’ (meaning ‘terrible lizard’), coined in the 1840s by Richard Owen, is misleading: in fact dinosaurs are neither reptiles nor lizards (nor, inevitably, terrible). Charles Knight, who painted them for the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago from the turn ...”

“... personality in various interludes and ‘interchapters’. He is, he admits, no Holmesian (Richard, not Sherlock) ‘pursuer’ of his subject. But he offers a vivid account of a visit he made to Kensal Green Cemetery as he began work on his biography. It was December (the month in which the novelist died): Thackeray’s grave on the south side, where ...”

“... where Lakatos has moved centre stage. Readers who like gossip will not be disappointed. The staid may be appalled by the ribald tone of this little bit of Mitteleuropa am Aldwych. Two items in the book will be new to almost everyone. Both concern Lakatos. The first, which is already being talked about (I heard several corrupt versions before reading the ...”

“... You’ll remember this. You may not live there anymore, and it might be years since you’ve been there, but you’ll recognise it instantly. Nothing has changed. Not a thing out of place, and not a detail altered: same views, same problems, same people, same faces, same old same old. ‘I feel violent with "hate” against this bloody town ...”

“... he up and he jumped in the water-hole, Drowning himself by the coolibah tree, And his ghost may be heard as it sings by the billabong, Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me? ‘Waltzing Matilda’, A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson (1895) Three weeks before the American presidential vote, the political right was victorious in the Australian federal ...”

“... person) as ‘indefinable … which he believes in a lively manner gives him ideas of whatever may be going forward externally’ – promoted in him ‘an almost irresistible inclination to visit different parts of his native country, in quest of knowledge or amusement’. At 26 he was not ready to pray away the rest of his life, to say nothing of ...”

“... with those of Queens or the Bronx) and hence its unequal distribution of resources. Manhattan may well be the world’s great cultural centre, yet few of the artists and intellectuals whose work animates it can afford to live there, and Bender says little about the effects of that. New Yorkers in search of cultural innovation are more likely to find it in ...”