“... on the periphery. Nor did many in the outside world realise quite what was emerging in Russia. Robert Lansing, Wilson’s secretary of state, whom Tooze rescues from the obscurity to which he is usually consigned, pointedly noted that this was a new type of despotism, intelligent rather than ignorant like the tsarist one, and to be feared. Wilson preferred ...”

“... are unfamiliar, and their stories are fascinating. Stargardt reconstructs the experiences of the young photojournalist Liselotte Purper from her unpublished correspondence with her fiancé and later husband, Kurt Orgel. We first encounter her at the beginning of the war, nailing blackout paper to the windowframes of her apartment in Berlin, then scampering ...”

“... appeared, to unexpected public jubilance, in 1942. By then Wilson had joined the cohort of clever young men thrusting their way through wartime Whitehall, where he made a name for himself with his prodigious memory and command of statistics. After entering Parliament for Labour in 1945 and becoming the youngest cabinet minister in more than a century, Wilson ...”

“... was supported by Tailyour family connections determined to use their influence on behalf of the young man. His African ancestry had to be explicitly denied. Once in India James’s letters reveal the extent to which he had adopted a white colonial identity: he gives hostile accounts of the Indian ‘natives’ and complains bitterly about lack of ...”

“... from dry yellow vitriol ground up with saltpetre.In the 17th century, the corpuscular theories of Robert Boyle and others overtook alchemy, and a more mechanical philosophy made the magical universe redundant. The shift was, however, gradual. In the 1670s George Starkey, tutor to the young Boyle, published commentaries on ...”

“... became avid readers of political economy, and some of them, notably the reforming minister Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, also made important contributions to it. They increasingly came to see formal legal privilege as unjustifiable. They also sought to escape from the fiscal double bind through reforms that would generate reliable, taxable economic growth.At ...”

“... St Guinefort, patron saint for the protection of children. Many sainted characters dream of bliss: Robert Browne, an 18th-century astronomer, of the young Jesus getting into bed with him; St Catherine of Siena of marrying Jesus, who gives her his foreskin for a ring (the lack of self-awareness among our pre-Freudian ...”

“... to the possibility – and it shows up.’ Her poems first came to light when she sent them to Robert Hayden, the first African American poet laureate. She won a Discovery Award, which was presented at the 92nd Street Y, followed by a dinner in Claudette Colbert’s apartment. This prize led to the publication in 1969 of Good Times – the first of ...”

“... marked ‘Kultur’ in one hand and a swooning, half-naked maiden in the other. The poster urged young Americans to ‘destroy this mad brute’.In wartime propaganda, as in the newly created ‘Western Civ’ surveys, civilisation was seen as the creation of Ancient Greece and Rome. ‘Plato to Nato’ courses may have introduced the mediating influence of ...”

“... designed by his best modellers. In this classicised allegory of colonial success, Hope, a young woman in flowing robes, reaches out to Peace with her olive branch, Art with her palette, and Labour, with a sledgehammer over his shoulder. A ship in the background shows the arrival of the colonists while a horn of plenty spills its contents onto the ...”

“... The prelude to their friendship, as Edith Wharton tells it in the autobiography, had her as a shy young suitor for the great man’s attention at dinners, hoping her ‘newest Doucet dress’ or ‘beautiful new hat’ would win his interest. But it was mainly her literary friendship with Paul Bourget, and her beginnings as an author, with The Greater ...”

“... certificate, on which her father claimed Durban as his birthplace, and a journalist called Robert Greer as his father. She sought his traces in the usual formal registers of Tasmania, where he had grown up, Victoria and South Africa. She pursued the Greers of the world backward through Griers, Griersons, Gregors and Macgregors to the kith of Scottish ...”

“... control was not sanctioned by the Bible. In the growth of the breakaway church Glas’s son-in-law Robert Sandeman played a seminal role: writing, travelling (even to America), and establishing a certain doctrinal identity by contesting the Calvinist doctrine of ‘imputed righteousness’, whereby God supposedly attributed Christ’s righteousness to the ...”

“... schemes could not be filled on the first advertisement ... By far the greatest fear expressed by young doctors is their perception of a changing ethos. They are concerned that a career in general practice will not now fulfil the sense of vocation that drew them to medicine.’ If the vocational role of GPs is really to be strengthened rather than weakened by ...”

“... mid-life reaction-to-the-reactionary. After all, the world has seen such things before; remember Robert Frost’s ‘I never dared be radical when young/For fear it would make me conservative when old.’ In fact, however, it is nothing of the sort. Norris is a passionately engaged radical critic of the Anglo-American ...”