“... has a longer reach than the Longman, which for copyright reasons is not yet available outside North America. Yet, like Heaney’s subtly ‘Hiberno-English’ translation of Beowulf, the Norton has never abandoned its roots. The footnotes translating ‘rounders’ as ‘baseball’ might once have limited the anthology’s sphere of influence, but ...”

“... teaching, and which might therefore be approved without apparent inconsistency. Second, Pope John XXIII, elected in 1958 as a ‘caretaker’ pontiff, had surprised everyone by encouraging Catholics to re-examine many aspects of their faith previously regarded as sacrosanct. In 1962 he called for a second Vatican Council to reinterpret the Catholic faith ...”

“... name Darkinbad the Brightdayler for his fearsome route up the sombre expanse of Pentire Head in North Cornwall. Now Perrin has used his scholarship to write an exceptionally wise biography called Menlove – the life of John Menlove Edwards, one of the strongest and boldest climbers between the wars and the chief explorer ...”

“... six-year-old Richard Rogers arrived in England in 1938. His father, an Anglophile descendant of a North Country dentist who had settled in Venice at the end of the last century, chose to keep his British passport rather than take Italian citizenship and fight for the Fascists. The Italian connection was to be important: it was in the office of his cousin ...”

“... understatement, nicely epitomises Conrad’s halfway naturalisation. The Conrads were crossing the North Sea, in 1914, en route for Poland. Jessie lay in her bunk feeling dreadful, and every half-hour, when she opened her eyes, she would see Conrad bending over her. What had come to me? Why had I given in like this? Such behaviour was enough to rob him of all ...”

“... other consists (or did in 1971) of playgoers for whom the theatre has never been the same since John Osborne, and if they don’t like a play they leave it in droves. Indeed, it sometimes seems that their chief pleasure in going to the theatre in Brighton is in leaving it, and leaving it as noisily as possible. In Beyond the Fringe the seats were going up ...”

“... One was the comparative study of values in five adjacent, mostly colonised, cultures in the North American South-West. The other was the Russian Research Center, which, Geertz wryly recalls, employed ‘social scientific techniques (refugee interviewing, content analysis) in an effort to penetrate, and foil, Soviet intentions.’ Grandiose and expensive ...”

“... agitation against the Corn Laws in the early 1840s, the movement’s leaders, Richard Cobden and John Bright, gave encouragement to a proposal by a young Scotsman, James Wilson, to set up a weekly newspaper that would argue for the cause of free trade. But Wilson had no intention of being a mouthpiece for the Anti-Corn Law League, insisting that his paper ...”

“... If there was a single figure whose ideas seemed pertinent in that deeply ambiguous moment, it was John Maynard Keynes. The implosion of the financial system vindicated him against his critics, who had declared markets self-stabilising and government intervention counterproductive. With trade, investment and consumption collapsing and millions cast into ...”

“... ever nearer, began a slow retreat in the searing summer heat. On 26 June at Samarra (fifty miles north of modern Baghdad) the rear of the Roman marching column, then straggling over four miles, was suddenly attacked. Julian rushed to bring reinforcements. In his haste he did not stop to strap on full body armour. The Romans forced the Persians to fall ...”

“... of entire social groups that happen to get in the way. And then there is what Michael Walzer and John Rawls both call a ‘supreme emergency’, when direct attacks on civilian targets are required in circumstances of dire military necessity. Since, in the nuclear age, ‘supreme emergency has become a permanent condition,’ this means that it is legitimate ...”

“... later by Queeney, by then happily married to Baron Keith of Stonehaven Marischal, Admiral of the North Sea Fleet, was that ‘it was from original and persevering dislike and real hatred of us all, from her hatred of our father, and certainly her general conduct to the whole family strongly savours of that nature.’ Such is the material Bainbridge draws on ...”

“... When an ailing John Maynard Keynes travelled to the American South in March 1946, he was delighted by what he found. The ‘balmy air and bright azalean colour’ of Savannah offered a welcome reprieve from the cold and damp of London, he wrote on arriving, and the children in the streets were livelier company than the ‘irritable’ and ‘exceedingly tired’ citizens of postwar Britain ...”

“... feeling that there must be more to political life than perpetual defeat. Neil Kinnock and John Smith felt this as strongly as their successors, but their successors went a lot further. In a famous essay published nearly ninety years ago, Max Weber suggested that politics was becoming the territory of the professional: politics was the politician’s ...”

“... Chief Scientific Adviser, or the Prime Minister, or the head of the Royal Society. It is John von Radowitz, PA’s swift and industrious science correspondent. His take on GM press releases, his choice of newsworthy papers from the big weekly journals (Nature on Thursday, Science on Friday), his slant on press conferences, is seen the instant he ...”