“... declined, the press was unable to invent any credible constitutional role for itself. Its power, once fairly accurately understood, is now the subject of paranoid exaggeration by politicians and of unreal boasting by tycoons. Such is the Koss view of the decline and fall of the political press – a view too nostalgic towards what were, after ...”

“... of 1851 celebrated ‘the working bees of the world’s hives’, according to its instigator, Henry Cole, who was to industrial design what Lubbock was to almost everything else. Careful fieldwork had established that the true model of industry, the ant, laid aside provender for the winter months, thereby furnishing a six-legged symbol of thrift. When it ...”

“... sense of personal and literary necessity; it shows infantile denial uncurling into a test of the power offered by denunciation and assertion. The narrative is finely poised between inner, outer and artistic reality, with all the jagged plunges between them that are part of the process. The Law of Enclosures refuses such grace, choosing to be cruder and ...”

“... of the social sciences have the confidence to invoke the ideals of Herbert Spencer and Henry James simultaneously. In his second volume, Runciman proceeds to his own substantive social theory. He remarks at the outset that he will here be concerned only with the explanatory segment of his overall prescriptions. But this involves no shrinkage of ...”

“... ever produced. Infinitely more profound and productive than his nearest 18th-century equivalent, Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, he was also far more prominent in national politics over a much longer span than John Milton or the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury in the 17th century, J.S. Mill in the 19th century, and Bertrand Russell this century. Nominated MP ...”

“... among them. But its most original, and arguably its founding, device is the shifting pronoun. Henry, the poem’s speaker and main subject, talks, – or rather growls, grumbles, whimpers and whines – to and usually about himself. His occupation of all three persons singular sets him off from poet and reader alike, staples him to the poem, yet also ...”

“... or a tank assault on the prime minister’s house. Asad was more gentlemanly: he eventually took power in a bloodless coup, his tanks deployed merely to ensure that his rival’s supporters gave up their jobs in the press and the radio. But before that there were several years of violent struggle between the Ba’thists and their Nasserist, Communist and ...”

“... history’s strong women. The daughter of Alfonso VIII of Castile (and hence the granddaughter of Henry II), Blanche was referred to by chroniclers as ‘the queen’ until her death in 1252, leaving the king’s wife, Margaret, to be described as ‘the young queen’. Blanche’s early regency was not, as far as we know, ever formally ended. When Louis went ...”

“... an extraordinary – and extraordinarily interesting – book, a model of intellectual biography. Henry Sidgwick’s day job was Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. He is today best known as the author of Methods of Ethics, a work that philosophers still mine, and the model for modern masterpieces such as John Rawls’s Theory of Justice and ...”

“... questions with verve and elegance. Perhaps, she thinks, it is all the fault of the old maestro Henry James. As a critic, and even more as a practitioner, he got the public used to the doctrine of the novel as fine art, ‘a creation beyond paraphrase or reduction’. In James’s novels, the characters are typically made to talk of one another, and not of ...”

“... The survival of aristocratic wealth and power into the late 19th and early 20th century, when their agricultural base had been in relative decline for over a century, is something that has puzzled numerous observers. Michael Thompson raised the question among economic historians nearly twenty years ago, and whole generations of political historians have offered alternative solutions ...”

“... from ceramics to furniture fittings, plasterwork and murals. These arts flourished under both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, as wealthy householders sought to surround themselves with beautiful and edifying objects to guide charitable behaviour. Unlike paintings on panel, such decoration wasn’t intended for prolonged contemplation: that, after all, would ...”

“... when she suddenly announces that she is waiting to meet someone in her local café. ‘His name is Henry Dale, but I didn’t know that. There was a lot more I didn’t know. That he is trapped in a November day, for example. The 18th. That I am not alone.’ Are we back in the marriage story? Really?Henry’s first reaction ...”

“... manner highlighted to the point of overdetermination in the battle scene near York in Act II of Henry VI Part 2, when the stage is simultaneously occupied by a nameless father bearing the corpse of the son he has just killed, and a nameless son bearing the corpse of the father he has just killed, both of them watched by a king who, having inherited the ...”

“... think of herself as a ‘joiner’, starts to attend. Later, she and her troubled brother, Henry, consult Margot informally in her capacity as a therapist. This makes a sort of sense, since the role Lizzie herself plays with others tends to be that of amateur shrink. Her husband wishes she was a professional: then they’d be rich. At the meditation ...”