“... in fact New Labour avant la lettre. Mullin is well aware that taking the paymaster’s shilling means forsaking his independence. As a parliamentary life form, junior ministers are even more amoebic than backbench MPs, who can at least hope to leave their mark by sponsoring a private member’s bill, select committee membership, tenacious single-issue ...”

“... the opening sentence by heart: ‘Du plus loin que je me souvienne, j’ai entendu la mer.’ It means: ‘As far back as I can remember I have heard the sound of the sea.’ The American translation confuses the verb écouter (‘to listen to’) with entendre (‘to hear’). This is not a good beginning. All my plans have been turned upside down. It will ...”

“... valley’s first major firm, Hewlett-Packard, was a military contractor. One of its co-founders, David Packard, was an undersecretary of defence in the Nixon administration; his signal contribution as a civil servant was a paper about overriding the laws preventing the imposition of martial law. Many defence contractors have flourished in Silicon Valley in ...”

“... of how the adaptation (or ‘co-adaptation’, as Darwin sometimes referred to it) of organic means to ends came about. Earlier natural theologians – including William Paley, whom Darwin read closely – had argued instead for the creationist view that only an intervening intelligence could explain the fittedness of eyes, wings and so on to their ...”

“... many modern historians recognise. In The Long Shadow, his recent study of the legacy of 1914-18, David Reynolds makes the important point that the bulk of contemporary poetry, far from being anti-war, was fiercely patriotic and positive in tone. It is often forgotten that Wilfred Owen went to his grave in 1918 still resolute that the allied cause was ...”

“... Germany’s many-sided nature as well as the diversity of its cultural achievements. This means not only demonstrating that German history didn’t begin in 1933 and end in 1945 but, more important, inviting the visitor to escape from the teleological vision that sees everything in the German past as leading up to Hitler and everything in its memory ...”

“... He’s invariably linked with a group of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least ...”

“... he didn’t credit the men and women he met in the East End – ‘a subservient lot’, he told David Marquand years later – with his conversion to socialism. That may have already been underway but would be shaped by his work teaching in the industrial north.His quarrel with Oxford in a sense drove him there. In 1905, Tawney joined the newly formed ...”

“... a majority in the Parliament in 2011; the mobilising effects of the independence referendum; David Cameron’s decision (presumably well prepared) to use the result as an excuse to push for ‘English votes for English measures’, which allowed the SNP to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. From that moment, as Scottish MPs knew, Labour was finished ...”

“... days a rather smaller fraternity, in academia at any rate) who regard it as the means by which Britain helped ‘civilise’ or ‘modernise’ the world. This, he claims, is ‘generally what the popular British debate about imperialism focuses on today’, and he regards both sides as mistaken, ‘because they get the whole nature of the ...”

“... Turks or Persians, they were in each case under the boot of a central regime prepared to use any means necessary to stifle the merest hint of autonomous sentiment. Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria – despite their abiding differences in other areas – would at times band together to hold down the Kurds, sharing intelligence and co-ordinating security ...”

“... and Vermeer – I started to stumble. It may seem notable that, say, Samuel Johnson and David Garrick set off together to conquer London from Lichfield, or that Emile Zola and Paul Cézanne were once classmates in Aix, but it’s not clear that such coincidences demand joint biographies, let alone overarching hypotheses.Snyder is proper in her ...”

“... dramatised, his master’s compositions. Rembrandt later returned to the subject, at least twice. David de Witt suggests in his catalogue essay that it wasn’t the subject, an exotic conversion story long interpreted in terms of the whitening of the soul by Christian baptism, that encouraged this flurry of painted renditions, so much as the pretext it gave ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”