“... the vulnerable from harm, but of taking responsibility for a harm that we in the industrialised North have both caused and benefited from. However, the worst effects of climate change are likely to be experienced by beings from other times, places or species, and as Stephen Gardiner points out, this allows us to rationalise our obligations to suit our ...”

“... the process. It also reflects the strikingly ‘novelistic’ character of many of their lives. John Barrell has observed acutely (in the LRB of 2 November 2000) that so-called literary biography seems now to have become markedly less ‘literary’, subordinating or virtually ignoring the work of the writer concerned, except insofar as it can be made to ...”

“... their own party on particular pieces of legislation. This process, which really got started under John Major, continued and in some ways accelerated under Blair. One of these backbench rebellions, on university top-up fees at the beginning of 2004, very nearly cost him his job. This new-found assertiveness means that at present the government probably has to ...”

“... A story, as John Burrow says of his own History of Histories, is selective. It looks forward ‘to its later episodes or its eventual outcome for its criteria of relevance’. Hence a difficulty: The impulse to write history has nourished much effective narrative, and narrative – above all in Homer – was one of the sources of history as a genre ...”

“... between the leaders of Britain and America was dogged by tensions neatly characterised by John Grigg when he wrote that Churchill became jealous of Roosevelt’s power, while Roosevelt was envious of Churchill’s genius. Grigg took the view that the prime minister ‘resented his enforced subordination to a man whom he secretly judged his ...”

“... by learning the details of female circumcision? In the same decade, Edward Sapir, analysing many North American languages, advanced the doctrine that a language reflects the way that its speakers understand the world – a way that may be incomprehensible without the language. Kant’s a prioris, structures of the human mind, were replaced by structures of ...”

“... Her topic makes most sense when the details of diplomacy are placed in a wider context.In 1836, John Stuart Mill claimed in an essay that Lord Melbourne’s government had become ‘smitten with the epidemic disease of Russophobia’, an irrational panic that had triggered an unnecessary increase in defence spending. ‘Russophobia’ has never quite left ...”

“... All Oxford and Cambridge colleges, many ‘redbrick’ universities and most of the celebrated North American universities began with private endowments. Many of our professorships, laboratories and libraries owe a similar debt to private benefaction. There is nothing new in a diversity of sources for a university’s central fund. It is certainly not an ...”

“... instance, with Lewis and Clark. Coleridge himself stipulated that a poet must have ‘the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an Enemy upon the Leaves that strew the forest’. Then there is a very personal judgment of Holmes’s, tucked away in a note: ‘Coleridge’s version of the emigration scheme has, at times, almost a Science ...”

“... away on the ship that was taking her home; was discovered, court-martialled and banished to the North-West Frontier. She was staying with her parents in the country when she heard his death announced on the Six O’clock News. Back in London, she finds a last letter from him, which she quotes – and that’s the end of him, he isn’t mentioned again. It ...”

“... can, into fantasy. He has some sympathy with the familiar constipation-theory, made so much of in John Osborne’s chronicle-play. ‘Luther’s scatology-permeated language has to be taken seriously as an expression of the painful battle fought body and soul against the Adversary.’ It may be worthwhile to recall that shit is nearly as plentiful in Marx’s ...”

“... more right-wing than is generally thought’. His hero is America’s Greatest Liar, Oliver North. He engages in constant ‘telephone terrorism’ against his editors, reducing supposedly hard men like Kelvin MacKenzie and David Montgomery to stammering wrecks and causing Patsy Chapman, the editor of the News of the World, to suffer a nervous ...”

“... this complex web of interests and arriving at a settlement will not be easy. According to John Stockwell, who ran the CIA’s covert programme in Angola during the Seventies, it was the Agency which laid the first stone in what is now an edifice of superpower rivalry. In Stockwell’s account, the Americans began funding the FNLA, one of three ...”

“... Modernism and non-Western image-making, to create subtle, layered masterpieces. On Bribie Island, north of Brisbane, ‘Fairweather had set himself up off the main road,’ Bail writes, ‘a mile or two from the shops and post office. A bushfire had swallowed his tent and all of his belongings ... if he painted at night it would be with the erratic assistance ...”

“... and complained in 1901 that he had offered himself unsuccessfully to every physicist ‘from the North Sea to the southern tip of Italy’. It was from a clerk’s post in the Bern patent office that the 26-year-old, still without a doctorate, wrote the four papers that transformed our understanding of the physical universe. Yet they were also very different ...”