“... of thousands of civilians. In Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to al-Qaida, John Mueller argues that the nonproliferation regime was responsible for these deaths, and for the staggering material costs of the war, and asks whether they were a price worth paying to prevent Saddam from getting a bomb – a bomb he would never have been able ...”

“... and was met by a near unanimous lack of critical acclaim. The screenplay was based on a novel by John Masters (1914-83), who had served in the British army in India before and during the Second World War. Masters’s family had had a relationship with India stretching back five generations; I have been told by elderly Indian army officers who served with him ...”

“... took place in 1814.) Cobb also served as supervisor to a strikingly large number of British and North American historians of France, many of them still practising. Cobb’s scholarly and pedagogical legacies place him securely in the profession’s pantheon. But unlike such Oxford contemporaries as Trevor-Roper, Maurice Bowra or even ...”

“... more interesting question is who needs the DSM anyway? First of all, bureaucracies. Everyone in North America who hopes their health insurance will cover or at least defray the cost of treatment for their mental illness must first receive a diagnosis that fits the scheme and bears a numerical code. For example, opening the book at random, I find 308.3 for ...”

“... by a further irony, was her own misunderstanding of Smith. It was not simply that the electorate north of the border had betrayed its free-marketeering heritage, but that Thatcher’s hero was far from the proto-Thatcherite she and her advisers assumed him to be. All great thinkers are misunderstood by posterity, at least in some measure. Ideas which remain ...”

“... be altered to follow not what actually happened, but what ought to have done. Surely (in Ragtime) John Pierpont Morgan might have invited Henry Ford to lunch to talk about reincarnation; and why wouldn’t the anarchist Emma Goldman have given a full-body massage to the society divorcée Evelyn Nesbit (accompanied by a lecture on sexual politics)? These lines ...”

“... of the Standard Oil Company, the series did little to celebrate the company or its founder, John D. Rockefeller. ‘It is doubtful if there has ever been a time since 1872 when he has run a race with a competitor and started fair,’ Tarbell wrote. But she didn’t call for an end to the corporate form Rockefeller had done so much to ...”

“... is found dead and blackened in his bed and in due course so is his grandson. Later, I dabbled in John Evelyn’s Sylva. Reprehensibly perhaps, I’ve never paid as much attention to my surroundings on a country walk as I have to descriptions of the natural world in books, all the better in Sylva for its being a guide for stewards and landowners. (You don’t ...”

“... They might have said that in at least one in three cases like this (think about Iraq, Iran and North Korea), or one in five, it will turn out that the rogue regime in question really does have or is developing weapons of mass destruction. Clearly, there was a not insignificant probability. And that, for the Cheney doctrine, is enough. Even if the ...”

“... the antecedents of Webb’s Red House in the work of Butterfield and Pugin and indeed in John Nash, who might claim, if any one architect could, to have invented the architecture Muthesius so admired. But to the Edwardians Nash was still despicable as a stucco-peddling Neoclassicist, his houses ‘cheerless’ and ‘rectangular’. It was to the ...”

“... for the upkeep of Guinevere’s grave in the churchyard at Longtown, on the Anglo-Scottish border north of Carlisle. She took very ill the least suggestion that there might be some doubt about its authenticity. Much of the phenomenon must be ascribed to Geoffrey of Monmouth. Born some thirty years after the Norman Conquest, Geoffrey, with his Norman name and ...”

“... Leone Company, Freetown’s 1200 founding settlers arrived in 1792. Most were former slaves from North America, who had earned their freedom by fighting for the British in the American War of Independence, and afterwards been granted land in Nova Scotia. These black loyalists would be joined by other groups, including Jamaican Maroons and, after the ...”

“... sleeping on the streets of Manhattan. There are more rodents currently infected with plague in North America (mostly in rural western states: Wyoming, Montana, Colorado) than there were in Europe at the time of the Black Death. Whenever we see a rat, it’s a weak rat, forced into the open to look for food; the strong ones stay out of sight. Brown rats ...”

“... Whalley had respectable local connections and was ready to mollify them, than they did in the North-West under Major-General Worsley, whose uncompromising reforming ardour drove him to an early death. Life was easier, too, in a group of southern counties, where Major-General Goffe, a stranger to those parts and out of his depth both socially and ...”

“... even foreword mail. An introduction presupposes ignorance. When Albert J. Guerard introduced John Hawkes’s novel The Cannibal in 1948, he could properly feel both Hawkes and his novel were unknown to most readers. But this is what Guerard begins by saying: ‘Many introductions exist to persuade the reluctant reader that the classic text under ...”