“... for taxes is the quasi-Hobbesian one succinctly expressed in the early 19th century by Richard Whately, an archbishop who moonlighted as a philosopher and political economist, when he defined taxation as ‘the revenue levied from the subject in return for the protection afforded by the Sovereign’. On this understanding, taxation is a kind of ...”

“... in belly dancing. Most scandalous of all was his debut back in Leningrad in Don Quixote on 27 May 1960. As the audience waited for the curtain to go up on the last act, Nureyev was in his dressing-room refusing to go on. The problem was the ‘lampshade’ pants he was obliged to wear. He wanted to appear in tights alone, as Western dancers did. His ...”

“... access and information, but not so much I have to pretend I am ready to support our boys come what may. So I tell him what I think, that it is the wrong war at the wrong time, but that if I was an Iraqi, I’d be longing for the Americans to come, and hoping they wouldn’t kill me, and hoping they would leave as soon as Saddam was gone. Vernon is friendly ...”

“... conductor to be brilliant regardless of the quality of the performance he directs, the orchestra may look on him with scepticism and a weary tolerance. The relationship of conductor to players is acutely asymmetrical. Managerial and strategic power lies with the conductor. His musical will is absolute, but he is entirely dependent on the players to implement ...”

“... friend of Dickens’s Mrs Gamp, and Thurber was a writer before he was a cartoonist); and it may be that the ‘extra’ dimension in this cartoon came about because its essential idea had first been established by another and earlier writer. Somewhere at the back of his mind Thurber was surely remembering, with profit and perhaps with gratitude, a poem ...”

“... to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government. Condorcet foresaw endless social progress, an egalitarian society in which technological advance would provide for an ...”

“... in Paris after she had moved there from Prague in the fall of 1925, suggests that Irma Kudrova may well be Tsvetaeva’s definitive biographer. In the breadth of her knowledge and the depth of her perception and intelligence, Kudrova is superior to subsequent biographers of Tsvetaeva, including – it must be admitted – myself. Irma Kudrova made two ...”

“... captive audience to give her views on ‘Zionist thugs’.) In recent years, Richard Gere’s moist tribute to the Dalai Lama has been more the sort of thing. That, plus a lot of red ribbons in solidarity with Aids victims. This year, the red ribbons were down a bit and the preferred cause was Public Broadcasting, which the Gingrich ...”

“... How many people in fact found Britain’s mainland colonies a land of opportunity? The late Richard Hofstadter suggested that the answer would almost certainly not sustain the success myth. In America at 1750: A Social Portrait, a wonderfully sensitive piece of writing, he observed that the servants as well as the slaves had been commodities, goods sold ...”

“... guests who threw corn-ears at the bridal pair (no confetti, please), and all who made ‘rather a May game of marriage, than a holy institution of God’. William Gouge, a London minister, was a little more relaxed: in 1622 he allowed ‘all those lawful customs that are used for the setting forth of the outward solemnity thereof, as meeting of ...”

“... results, I told him proudly, in the partition calculus he’d invented with his fellow Hungarian Richard Rado; I was also trying to settle a conjecture in infinite combinatorics – that there was no infinite descending sequence of countable order types. He ignored the first, questioned me about the second, thought for a few mom ents, then shrugged – which ...”

“... in the spring of 1975 there was little left of the old society. Cambodia had become Kampuchea and Richard Nixon had given birth to Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge Communists sealed their borders and withdrew into isolation. The cities were forcibly evacuated and the people were sent back to the land – not to the villages from which they had come, but to new ...”

“... till his arm ached, and then he flung him into a chair, gasping, cursing, and scarcely human. And Richard Chandos v. Boler, the Boche villain of Dornford Yates’s Cost Price:   ‘Look on your own face,’ I said; ‘for, by God, when you see it next, it won’t look the same.’   Then, as a man puts the weight, I put his face to the wall beside the ...”

“... yellow sands’, in which a succession of voices discourse on the fairy painter and parricide Richard Dadd (odd that no one comments on the singular aptness of his surname). Dadd, having taken his father for the devil, went at him in Cobham Park with a spring-knife – a weapon more effective than Christy Mahon’s loy. Poor dad – or, if you like, poor ...”

“... political refugees. Of the Germans, many were businessmen, artists, musicians and scholars. They may have had a political preference for liberal England, especially if they were Jews, which many of them were: but if they did settle here, it was from choice, not necessity. A few straddled the professional/exile divide, like Friedrich Engels who came to ...”