“... The broadcast was an exercise in propaganda. At the end, however, ‘the hapless, but by no means witless, prisoner’, as Said calls him, outflanks his interrogator, who is blinkered by counter-insurgency jargon. Israeli broadcaster: Lastly, Mr Terrorist: would you like to send a message to your family? Palestinian fedayi: I’d like to assure my ...”

“... as ‘a bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956’; David Ignatow’s poetic idiom as ‘Brooklynese speech’. But at least it doesn’t pretend to be more than it is – a ‘companion’, not a history. I wish I could say the same for the season’s lot of general surveys, which look so authoritative to the ...”

“... Blundell heretically declared it unnatural and took a short way to putting matters right. ‘By means of a little castration and cutting away the brats it became a sleeping Venus and as pleasing a figure as any in this collection.’ Knight went about wholeheartedly preaching the cause of free love and paganism, to which he adhered as a matter of practice ...”

“... an electrician at the huge naval dockyard, remembered him [Hore-Belisha] at the 1935 hustings’ means ‘The only person we could find who remembered anything of Hore-Belisha [and it turns out not to be much] was one Ron Lemin.’ More serious is the use of ‘later’: ‘Later he [Foot] wrote of the show trials: “How deeply the left craved to give the ...”

“... is Frank McGregor, whose unpublished thesis on the Rangers (Oxford, 1968) has been pillaged by David wholesale, yet who gave to him the most interesting part of his case. For McGregor, in several articles, has himself developed the argument that George Fox and others used the odium of Ranterism as a useful disciplinary control, and, in the case of early ...”

“... or fifteen years – ‘what has come to be called the politics of culture’. This, he explains, means studying painting in the social and philosophical context in which it was seen by the society that produced it, in terms of the roles, acknowledged or unacknowledged, that it may have played, of the conflicts implicit in individual works and of what they ...”

“... clearly carry weight, but not necessarily an overriding weight in every case. In the 18th century David Hume affirmed, entirely truthfully, that he fully believed, like everyone else, that the sun would rise on the following day, but meanwhile the famous critique of induction – the demonstration that we can have no reason for supposing that the future will ...”

“... there has been a tendency to find the key to the universe in the curl of a teenager’s lip, in David Bowie’s lipstick or Janis Joplin’s hair. The shapings of history, the contours of time and place, are to be found in the stirrings of drum and guitar; or, deep as dimples, high as a quiff, on the heads of King and Queen Rockers from this time and ...”

“... and time. But tabling the world in that way, and enjoying its benefits, involves standardised means of representation, and these standards had to be invented, fought for and secured. The standardisation of the world, like its ‘disenchantment’, is a much misunderstood business. No intellectual passions are stronger than those involved in achieving ...”

“... ANC policy, its 1949 Programme of Action had envisaged pressure, typically through strikes, as a means of negotiation. (‘What,’ the presiding judge asked, ‘is the value of participation in the government of a state of people who know nothing?’) But the court became increasingly impatient with the prosecution’s fantasy that the ANC’s concealed ...”

“... dat animum (‘It is the holy love of the fatherland which moves us’). Half a century ago, Dom David Knowles, doyen of humane medievalism, hailed the MGH among the ‘great historical enterprises’, which it certainly was (and is) despite its original nationalist agenda. Medievalist Wissenschaft (the term has scientific connotations largely absent from ...”

“... at the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. She pre-empted the humiliation by suicide – either by means of her trademark asp (which, as the symbol of Egyptian monarchy, turned her death into a defiant assertion of her royal power) or, as some ancient writers thought, thanks to some more mundane poison. ‘I will not be triumphed over,’ Livy has her ...”

“... Jamie (two), Gordon, Nigella, the clownish American TV chef Emeril Lagasse, Julia Child, Elizabeth David, Irma Rombauer (compiler of the American suburban kitchen bible, The Joy of Cooking), and even Delia. In the US, the cable TV Food Network reaches 85 million households, guaranteeing financial success for its stars’ books, videos and restaurants and ...”

“... farm programmes. In 1999, farm subsidies totalled $28.7 million for Swisher County . . . which means that almost everybody in Swisher County, regardless of race, relies on a handout of some kind, either directly or indirectly. Even with Coleman exposed and the defendants freed from prison, many ‘still seem to believe that Coleman had been guilty of ...”

“... Marvell and many more – moved between history and poetry or drama, finding in them complementary means of instilling virtue and wisdom and influencing events. History, which was seen as a branch not only of scholarship but of rhetoric and of eloquence, was often written in verse. Like playwrights, historians invented speeches for their characters. Historical ...”