“... servants framed, implemented and ran them. Late in the administration of Lindsay’s predecessor Robert Wagner, there had been some notably unsuccessful efforts at incorporating community participation in anti-poverty programmes. Lindsay, and his young mayoral aides, all newcomers to the day-to-day management of City ...”

“... of ghosts themselves. In the 1940s a vicar reported that he had been embraced by a ‘naked young woman’: in earlier days this wouldn’t have been admitted to the record of the proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, on moral grounds if on no other. Finucane concludes that the suffering souls of purgatory are more understandable, not as ...”

“... it was in this immediate context that the Survey of London was born. In 1894, C.R. Ashbee, a young East End architect, with a passionate interest in the Arts and Crafts Movement, was so outraged by the demolition of the Old Palace at Bromley-le-Bow that he set up a Committee for the Survey of London Monuments, which planned to publish lists of all ...”

“... relation between reason and unreason in this area. A recent and distinguished contribution is Robert Parker’s essay on pollution and purification, Miasma. One main feature of this research has been its invocation of comparative anthropology and sociology: not only ancient texts and remains but also the findings of modern fieldworkers have been adduced ...”

“... year or two of the originals. Already, too, there is no question of comparable English authors – Robert May, William Rabisha – being translated in the reverse direction. Yet at this period the connections between cookery and other arts and crafts could still be noticed without undue self-consciousness. Pepys and Evelyn may well have discussed with each ...”

“... in Erkenntnis in its great days. And it is of course true that in the Thirties in Oxford the young A.J. Ayer was seen by most of his philosophical elders as expounding an alien and distinctively Germanic doctrine in Language, Truth and Logic. Ayer himself, although recognising how much he shared with the native analytical school of philosophers who had ...”

“... in verse; and of the poems resurrected from his twenties, that Hardy was fond of the remembered young man who had written them, and that he had no sense of self-criticism, ever. Hardy’s turn to verse may be the most interesting event in his life during these years, but it is not a major subject in his letters. Here neither literature nor life concerns him ...”

“... William Rees-Mogg should have paid for this to be published for us. Angels is a first novel by a young American poet. Its dedication is to ‘H.P. and to those who have shared their experience, strength and hope’. Who H.P. may be is decently private; but the phraseology directly alludes to the tradition and practice of Alcoholics Anonymous. Angels ...”

“... an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass,’ the young Cage replies (as recounted in the ‘Indeterminacy’ lecture): ‘in that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.’ The older Cage grins and says the wall doesn’t exist. And then we start hearing that he is the most influential ...”

“... have produced any better or more effective public servants than Oliver Franks, Edwin Plowden, Robert Hall, Edward Bridges, Alec Cairncross, Edward Hall-Patch, Richard Hopkins and Roger Makins, to name only a few of the ‘mandarins’ who served the Labour Government so loyally. Therein lay the problem, however. They did what their Labour masters ...”

“... shows his Secretary of State making an almost identical remark. It is with this episode that the young American scholar Scott Lucas, in the introduction to Divided we stand, opens his meticulously researched and pleasantly written examination of the 1956 crisis seen as a landmark in Anglo-American relations. What started as a PhD thesis has been happily ...”

“... in secrecy long after Kennedy was dead.For years, the accepted history of the crisis held that the young president faced down the Soviets’ reckless gamble with calm and unyielding resolve. As Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who knew better, summarised it: ‘The other guy blinked.’ This version stood unchallenged not least because it was sanctioned by ...”

“... to convey this understanding of history: even controversial figures like the rapacious conqueror Robert Clive were enrolled in the pantheon of imperial greatness. The statue of the Bristol slave trader Edward Colston, toppled last year, was put up in 1895, though he died in 1721. But the strategy was a failure: more people learned about Colston in the 24 ...”

“... begins in 1954. Modelling himself on his father, who was one of the architects of the New Deal, Robert Wagner Jr won the mayoral race promising a ‘New Deal for New York’. Reforming the city jail system was part of his vision. Just as now, jails were used to manage unemployment and instability in working-class life, with ...”

“... writing poetry in Europe – but he evidently took pride in his facility and his craftsmanship. Robert Lowell responded with a fellow craftsman’s appreciativeness when he observed of Auden’s multifarious prose: ‘Much hard, ingenious, correct toil has gone into inconspicuous things: introductions, anthologies and translations. When one looks at them ...”