“... passions of a distinctly non-Redmondite sort still to be found in the party. In a speech of 11 May 1916 he condemned the execution of the rebel leaders and the large number of often indiscriminate arrests carried out under martial law. They were damaging to British interests in Ireland: ‘If Ireland were governed by men out of Bedlam you could not pursue ...”

“... had briefly worked for them as a freelance copywriter, and a friend gave him an address for Richard Branson, who was impressed by his demo tape and offered him a multi-album deal. Johnson had the foresight to turn it down, agreeing only to one album. (He would subsequently sign to Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, then Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong ...”

“... Trevor-Roper), art and popular taste (Quentin Bell), the evolution of the English landscape (Richard Muir) – are excellent and briskly-written popularising surveys. But the whole enterprise, I do think, is compromised by those gestures towards ‘the English Spirit’, ‘the making of a tradition’ etc. (They come thickest, it is true, in the ...”

“... even very recently, was attached to any admitted departure from sexual regularity. The fact that Richard Crossman lost an Oxford fellowship for having a divorce, and was not the last fellow to do so, is one which is now received with general incredulity. The fact that it is now perfectly safe, for example, for a couple to admit that they live together when ...”

“... the US Marine headquarters overnight on 22-23 October after attending a pop concert. These points may seem trivial, but inattention to detail has been one of the most salient and devastating features of US policy in the Middle East – as Mr Bradlee’s book makes clear. It was not really surprising that North and his colleagues in Washington sometimes seemed ...”

“... of its own dynamic or the causes of its own crises’. While the turn to ‘British history’ may be motivated by waning English confidence, however, many Irish and Scottish historians interpret it as a form of intellectual colonialism. Having dismantled Whig and Marxist explanations of political change in England, revisionists like Conrad Russell make ...”

“... his memoirs as a way of publicising a new cause: the unification of Italy. When he heard in May 1860 that Garibaldi had sailed for Sicily, Dumas changed his plans and followed in his schooner, the Emma. But not with all convenient speed. He missed the taking of Palermo, having dallied at Marseille to throw a party and stopped for a day in Sardinia to ...”

“... that his thoughts strayed to ‘popsies’ even while working hard on the structure of DNA; Richard Feynman enjoyed having himself photographed playing the bongos, and, like Kary Mullis, broadcast his enthusiasm for topless bars: ‘When my calculations didn’t work out,’ Feynman said, ‘I would watch the girls.’ Mullis just rides the wave farther ...”

“... but he was aware of the potential of civic government. He recognised that the Victorian burgher may have seen himself as the arch-opponent of collectivism – ‘“Socialism, Sir?” he’d say: “Don’t waste the time of a practical man by your fantastic absurdities. Self-help, Sir, individual self-help, that’s what made our city what it ...”

“... architects to think there was anything for them in new Tube stations besides the ‘fit-out’. As Richard MacCormac, whose firm has designed the new Southwark Station, put it: ‘the engineers design the system, then the architects dress it up. Was it just a matter of deciding which tiles to put on the platform walls?’ When Paoletti started looking for ...”

“... mirror – heir, in this, to the Winnicottian mother. Here, and elsewhere, the Anglophone reader may be reminded of the importance of this theme in English literature, as in Donne’s ‘The Good-Morrow’ (‘My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears’) or Shakespeare’s proto-structuralist joke about infidelity in The Merchant of Venice, when ...”

“... Martin was not only French, but had served as an officer in the French force at Pondicherry. In May 1760, he defected to the East India Company, and like Polier, wound up in Lucknow and in the service of the nawab. Again like Polier, he made a fortune: by 1800 he was worth over £400,000, and was probably the wealthiest European in India. Just as Polier had ...”

“... new moon, and then eight days after the next full moon, they would be bound to come up double. (It may work with tulips, too, he suggests.) Platt also offered some very strange advice about fertilisers: ‘Dogs & cats applyed to the rootes of trees before the sap rise, have recovered many old decaying trees. Shred them.’ These modest and largely neglected ...”

“... evolutionary pressure. It was grouped together with books by Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins to form the canon of ‘new atheism’. I’ve Been Thinking opens with an account of the open-heart surgery Dennett underwent following a near fatal heart attack. To reduce the risk of mini-strokes, his surgeons reversed the flow of blood to his ...”

“... today – to the PLO.The bequest was the third of thirteen listed in his will of 7 May 1975, after another, larger one to the Catholic Missions Society of America, Maryknoll Fathers. There was no ringing oratory: he simply directed the money to go to the Palestine Liberation Organisation, 101 Park Avenue in New York, or if they had ...”