“... interest is the section where Atlas gives a draft of the work in progress to the social scientist Edward Shils – a long-time colleague and frenemy of Bellow’s at the University of Chicago – to vet for errors, misemphases, solecisms and overall tone and conditioning, much as the critic Dwight Macdonald had served as the gruff, avuncular sounding board ...”

“... Liberal William Ewart Gladstone, who died while he was trying to solve the Irish Question, said of the First Opium War, which ended with Hong Kong under British rule: ‘a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know and have not read of.’ A comic classic, Foreign ...”

“... companies, retail stores and other entities’.1 There is an interesting discussion of US money in Edward Castronova’s overview Wildcat Currency: he explains that states didn’t have the right to issue currency themselves, but they did have the right to regulate the issuance of money on their territory.2 This was a system prone to unintended ...”

“... offered overwhelmingly grotesque or sentimentalised images of its existence, but it might also be said that minorities are under no obligation to bond with the positive images they are offered. It may be, for instance, that a deaf viewer watching a properly captioned print of, say, Edward Scissorhands, will identify with ...”

“... site of the Battle of Gettysburg is the first such enterprise in modern history. The precedent, as Edward Everitt, the Harvard president and professor of classics who was the main speaker at its dedication, pointed out, was the ‘immortal field’ at Marathon, which we read about in Herodotus. Between the ancient Greeks and modern times we seem to have been ...”

“... important, of biomass over biodiversity, environmentalism over ecology proper. Apologists for what Edward O. Wilson has termed ‘the prosthetic environment’ picture nature as a controllable steady gate – a model which lends itself to idioms drawn from good housekeeping (knowing what is in the global larder) and good living (the environment as ...”

“... spoke impromptu about the memory of the First World War in France: ‘It is like a scar,’ he said, lightly touching his left wrist, ‘that can still cause pain.’ This was true in a literal sense of Pierre Renouvin. Called up when war broke out in 1914, the 21-year-old Renouvin was sent to the front, where he lost first his right thumb and then his ...”

“... Dreyfus’s guilt, but faced with the evidence, he put prejudice to one side. When General Gonse said to him, ‘What do you care if that Jew rots on Devil’s Island?’ Picquart replied: ‘What you are saying, General, is abominable. I will not in any event take this secret with me to the grave.’ From the moment of his discovery, Picquart stopped at ...”

“... and does not spring virginally from the brilliant minds of doctors and their experiments. That said, one strand of this narrative is unashamedly triumphalist and teleological: ‘winner’s history’, giving more space to the Greeks than to the Goths, and to the father of Greek medicine than to Greek root-gatherers. ‘From Hippocrates to ...”

“... stress of it all gets to you, it doesn’t matter what you do to separate work from home,’ T. said. ‘I’ve been on antidepressants twice at least here. You can’t separate home from work, and because I’m agency there’s no sick pay for it. So when I’ve had that, I’ve just had to put up and shut up. It’s not like I can take off a month to pull ...”

“... can shape the compass of a biography, personal knowledge lighting up but also limiting what can be said. Perhaps there are traces of that here; but, on the whole, in the warmth and grace of Spurling’s account there is a natural tact but little sign of inhibition. Perhaps simple consideration of sales was a factor: over a certain length, publishers rarely ...”

“... or at least in Protestant accounts. Greater notice is taken of the plaudits of the chronicler Edward Hall and of the (qualified) gratitude of the martyrologist John Foxe. Yet there has been an alternative tradition in Henrician historiography, and not only on the Catholic side. Beside Shakespeare’s tribute to Henry stands Sir Walter Ralegh’s ...”

“... both in the text and the index. By no stretch of the imagination can the students of T.H. Green be said to have ‘invented’ the Fabian Society (perhaps Inglis was thinking of Toynbee Hall). Broad Street, Oxford, ‘one of the noblest university thoroughfares in the world’, does not lead past Duke Humfrey’s library; nor can a street with the Indian ...”

“... ceaseless opposition cannot be over-emphasised,’ the Countess of Warwick (a former mistress of Edward VII) wrote: ‘The powers of Science have given aerial war a capacity of devastation and destruction without parallel in the history of mankind.’ It was important that people were ‘made more fully alive to this danger’ and, with this aim in mind, it ...”

“... for Security Policy in Washington, opinion-mongers at the Daily Mail and ruddy yeomen like Edward Leigh, the Member for Gainsborough, are not the only people waging the struggle: their enemy’s enemies are just as passionate and they’ve done their homework with a lot more diligence. Tarek El Diwany, author of The Problem with Interest, believes ...”