“... ends by revering them. Stone might have written a more serious novel, even with this subject-matter, were it not for the hardened simplicities of his realism, which clear away all complication even in the process of announcing complication. In previous novels, in particular in Dog Soldiers and Outerbridge Reach, Stone has often written with vivacious ...”

“... savant to prompt such thoughts: there was, for example, the other giant of evolutionism, Herbert Spencer, piling up the successive volumes of the Synthetic Philosophy, topped off with the filing-cabinet of The Data of Ethics. But Spencer, though a recluse in later years, was a larger figure in himself, a quirky, querulous, assertively self-made ...”

“... essay for the Venice Biennale on the forged metal sculptures of Chadwick, Armitage and Butler, Herbert Read wrote that they displayed the ‘geometry of fear’ and found allusions to snares, teeth and claws. In the wake of the atom bomb and revelations about the concentration camps, Read’s description helped to determine an angst-filled interpretation ...”

“... of suburban life is an old one. In a famous study of a 1950s Pennsylvania suburb, the sociologist Herbert Gans found that the urban elite looked on ‘the lower middle and working class with whom I lived in Levittown as an uneducated, gullible, petty “mass” which rejects the culture that would make it fully human, the “good government” that would ...”

“... war loomed. In particular, he tended to the view that it was better to stay onside with Japan, no matter what outrages it committed, rather than get pushed into a pro-American corner. Self tries, rather desperately, to see merit in Chamberlain’s Iron Chancellorship, repeatedly appealing to unspecified ‘modern econometric analysis’ to suggest that he ...”

“... be handled with care. Words and meanings aren’t things that can be fused together, or for that matter split apart. Writing can give us a sense of language being rammed up against reality, as in Hamlet’s ‘Nay, but to live in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed’, or it can seem to cut loose from the world, as a lot of Shelley does, but these spatial ...”

“... as a teaching subject in the universities, was relegated to the junior schools, as a picturesque matter for projects rather than a testing ground for analytic skills or a source of serious knowledge. The new methods of teacher-training instituted in the Sixties may also have helped to make historians uncertain about their subject. Under the PGCE, the ...”

“... approach of later scholars to Botticelli’s mythologies. Warburg’s fellow Florentine scholar Herbert Horne, for example, praised his ‘admirable little work’ and followed him in describing Primavera as ‘no mere illustration of some particular passage, but a cento of many ideas’. But almost no one followed him in every detail; Horne, for his ...”

“... the anthologist of political verse has the same kind of aims as the anthologist of cat verse: a matter of isolating a particular kind of subject-matter – in the latter case, feline quadrupeds; in the former, battles, royal weddings, Parliamentary debates, court and cabinet scandals, and so on. But poetry engages with ...”

“... associate directors, accused Teller of knowingly misrepresenting the technical facts of the matter, Teller and his allies had him hounded out of Livermore. Woodruff eventually fetched up at the rival Los Alamos weapons lab, where he was made very welcome, assuming a position whose title (‘program director for non-proliferation and arms ...”

“... Kant and themselves as contributors to a single discussion with a single subject matter’. They needed to realise, he said, that concepts ‘have a history’, punctuated not only by the thoughts of the great dead philosophers but also by events like the decline of the Greek city-state, the formation of Christendom, the rise of capitalism ...”

“... massively in the leader polls and was far less popular than his party; the campaign, largely a matter of a few videos and avoiding the London press, was good only in comparison to Foot’s; and the Party was so ill-prepared that, despite four years of reflection, it was still chronically unsure even about such key issues as its taxation policy. For some ...”

“... the cosmopolitan upper echelon of merchant banks, everybody knew everybody else and business was a matter of mutual trust, mutual favours and mutual insurance. Mavericks were checked by the gold sovereign, which was an unbreachable barrier against currency speculation, and by the governor of the Bank of England, who kept monetary policy tight. The big-time ...”

“... could be Labour leader, let alone prime minister. Hugh Dalton called him ‘a little mouse’, and Herbert Morrison endlessly intrigued to displace him. As for Attlee himself, he was always extremely modest about his talents. Of the times he was forced to stand in for Churchill during the war he would write: ‘It is no use trying to stretch the bow of ...”

“... the society he lives in has almost killed off the capacity for social ‘mutation’. But, as a matter of fact, he himself is a mutation. Citizen Ken is one of the first known examples of a new strain of politician entirely resistant to all known forms of media poison. The last ten years have brought campaigns against the personal and public lives of ...”