“... up as criminal? Would amateurs with the professional skills of James Murray, Frederick Furnivall, Richard Chenevix Trench – if they exist today – be foolish enough in this post-Thatcherite world to give away the fruits of their labour? Why slave to make future generations of OUP publishers rich? Nor, with the economic short-termism that they must nowadays ...”

“... Martha Nussbaum, with her Sixties sensibilities, responded to a New York Times op-ed article by Richard Rorty, a relatively senior philosopher who identifies with the Old Left of the Forties. Rorty had urged young Americans, especially Leftists, to cease denigrating the value of patriotism and take seriously the ‘emotion of national pride’ as essential ...”

“... patronising and taken not a blind bit of notice. And so on, round and round. The 1960s generation may have had a dream, but it would seem from the contemporary sixth-former’s point of view that they didn’t achieve it. It would also seem that they have become dream-bound in relation to their past. Sheila Rowbotham’s memoir of the 1960s is an attempt to ...”

“... in 1991. A loss of trust in experts is the hallmark of the risk society. Whatever scientists may say, miasmas are still thought to assault and pollutants to poison. But pinning them down as allergens has not been easy. Research results have been counterintuitive. Studies of allergy incidences in the two parts of Germany soon after the fall of the Berlin ...”

“... the population of Birmingham rose from 15,000 to 70,000. The ironworks in which he had an interest may have failed but with his involvement Bage had taken a stake in the future. Older attitudes lingered, however. A reviewer of Joseph Priestley’s Memoirs claimed in 1806 that ‘there is something universally presumptuous in provincial genius.’ It wasn’t ...”

“... speaker’s click brings up the next slide. On the page we are out of his or her control, and we may get stuck or distracted. The idea that it is possible, desirable even, to arrive at a single winning set of cards, even at an agreed set of artists, has gone. Success lies in finding sequences that carry a narrative, although the notion that there is only one ...”

“... then would have swived the other sister both’. He fought for the invading Tudor forces against Richard III. Unsubstantiated legend has him as a standard-bearer at Bosworth, cut down close to the person of the man who would soon be king. Whatever the exact truth, he died a hero with a claim on the gratitude of the new regime. He did not leave much land for ...”

“... of the Maharishi kicking in, and then out, it would all have taken on another dimension still. You may not have remained at one with the universe, but somehow the erstwhile notion that you became it by being part of it, then all of it, and that it became you in microcosm, would have left you feeling that immense forces were in play when you tried to figure out ...”

“... went ape.’ This view is challenged in the other immediate response to the 2013-14 events, Richard Sakwa’s Frontline Ukraine. Sakwa has reservations about the 2004 Orange Revolution; the question of whether it was a people’s revolution or a revolutionary coup ‘remains pertinent to this day’. The Maidan uprising began as a protest against the ...”

“... centre which Wertham opened in a church basement in Harlem in 1946 with help from Ellison and Richard Wright. Six years later Wertham was called as an expert witness for the NAACP in one of the cases reviewed in Brown v. Board of Education. With the evidence of his experiences treating traumatised children in Harlem, he persuaded a federal judge that ...”

“... allowing every potential show of principle to appear like a fluttering of small resentments. It may be the chief characteristic of the Windsor dynasty, this ability to make grand things small. The Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, wrote a poem for the wedding which rather effectively takes them out of the great tide of history and into the more local business ...”

“... behind by More. At times, he seems to have known exactly what lay ahead. In his History of King Richard III (1513), he wrote that ‘kings’ games ... were stage plays, and for the more part played upon scaffolds.’ The ‘More part’, indeed. At other times, only we, in retrospect, can see how the ironies of this life buckle. Who else could have ...”

“... is down to the fact that he has been off training with an injury for a couple of months. This may be so; but the truth is he if anything looks a bit thinner than he has done playing for Real Madrid in the last couple of seasons. I think he’s a bit porky for no other reason than that he likes his pies. I also think there is something noble about a ...”

“... Sisman has now studied three: Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Briggs, leaving only Eric Hobsbawm to Richard Evans. Briggs’s widow, Susan, commissioned Sisman to write this Life, and in fact the man himself noted before his death in 2016 that if there had to be a biography, Sisman would be the right person to do it. The result is an elaborately detailed and ...”

“... Trade Center, the harbour beyond and then the American continent. During Fleet Week, at the end of May, a US aircraft carrier group would dock at the Midtown piers – the carrier seemed to dwarf the Twin Towers. Looking down at the streets below, you could see lines of sailors in white uniforms looking like trains of ants weaving their way into the city. My ...”