“... details and sustained effort were generally not his thing. According to Aubrey, Ralegh ‘spake broad Devonshire to his dyeing day’. This sounds like a social impediment rather than an asset, but Ralegh even managed to turn his West Country origins to his advantage. A statesman in 16th-century England who looked west saw both dangers and opportunities. A ...”

“... last great cause’ is echoed in the reminiscences of the international volunteers quoted in Richard Baxell’s exhaustive study, Unlikely Warriors: The British in the Spanish Civil War and the Struggle against Fascism. John Bassett, who served in the International Brigades for nine months, from March 1938 until they were disbanded that ...”

“... stories even among those who could never dream of setting foot inside an actual Greyfriars. Three broad themes can even so be identified, though Rose does not isolate them as such: the cultural conservatism of the autodidact tradition; the emancipating power of great literature, whatever its ideological colouring; and, somewhat undercutting this, the sheer ...”

“... details are not entirely accurate – Hans Driesch’s name is consistently misspelled and Richard Dawkins is awarded a Nobel Prize (in what field?) – but Kolata is particularly good at providing accessible explanations of scientific ideas and achievements, and even those who know very little about contemporary biology should be able to follow ...”

“... American citizen and, by 1897, professor of mathematics at the new University of South Dakota. Richard Pipes’s The Degaev Affair is the first book-length treatment of the extraordinary lives of Sergei Degaev: his double role as revolutionary and agent provocateur up to 1883, and his subsequent life in America, a life so utterly distinct from what ...”

“... All this is strangely reassuring in the face of Foucault’s more fantastic speculations and the broad sweep of his ambitious project. Having the full text available in English undoubtedly increases one’s admiration for Foucault’s achievement, though a few irritants and some more serious problems remain. Cooper’s precious and self-serving introduction ...”

“... unselfconscious urgency. They would have spoken for him better than the attempt to represent the broad range of his works on canvas, from his genre lines in philosophers and banditti to his grandiose but gormless satires. Rosa’s ambitions were wide, his gifts narrow. (In the permanent collection at Dulwich you meet people whose territory he tried to step ...”

“... sketches of recent Labour history, with amusing ruminations on Brown’s resemblance to both Richard Nixon and Bela Lugosi and a painfully accurate description of his stony smile: ‘Brown’s grin was fixed, as always, as a grimace; there was some gurning, a movement that suggested chewing, the clearing of a shred of tomato skin maybe from in front of ...”

“... identity is redacted, but the editor, Larry Siems, thinks it may have been the navy reservist Richard Zuley, identified in court documents as the Special Projects Team chief for Slahi’s interrogations at Guantánamo, a retired Chicago cop now working for the aviation police at O’Hare International Airport. Slahi was broken. After medical treatment and ...”

“... as a language uniting the extremes of philo and anti-semitism. Necessarily, his book covers a broad political spectrum, from extreme right to extreme left and from cosmopolitans to Little Englanders. While Disraeli was both a prosemitic racist and the inventor of jingoism, Marx may in some degree be held responsible for the populist anti-semitism of the ...”

“... forces. What we’re seeing in Cairo is both new and old: not an Islamist revolt but a broad-based social movement bridging the secular-religious divide, a 21st-century version of the Arab nationalism that had for many years seemed a spent force. And though the Egyptian protests have found a provisional figurehead in Mohammed ElBaradei, the ...”

“... is happening.Afterwards, she collects her clothes and lets him walk her to a taxi. She watches his broad smile as he chivalrously, and uncharacteristically, opens the car door, and she knows that he has won. Nobody is going to bury that bastard.On the face of it, Actress shouldn’t be as powerful a novel as it is. It’s full of clichés: the ingénue ...”

“... to the macro-potential of micro-changes also lay at the heart of ‘nudging’, the term coined by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein for scarcely noticeable government interventions that alter individual behaviour with minimal effort, cost or constraint, but significant social benefit. One of the best-known examples in Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge (2008) is ...”

“... hostility,’ and that may be so. But there has been some excellent work done on Pound recently: Richard Sieburth’s Instigations, Leon Surette’s A Light from Eleusis, and now Alexander’s manageably-sized study of the whole corpus of the poetry, and Woodward’s of The Pisan Cantos. My feeling is that Pound’s stock is rising, and that one reason for ...”

“... of (Slav) Macedonian national mythology in much the same way that Karakasidou reveals the broad outlines of late 19th and early 20th-century Greek history. In all three works, the grip on conventional history is admirably firm, and one is spared the sinking feeling which the inexperienced explorer usually has on reaching the swamp of anthropological ...”