“... in a tiny ghetto and working in the homes of local white families. I grew up in Long Beach, but by 1968 had moved to the city. My parents, however, still lived there, and my outspoken mother arranged to see the city manager, a non-partisan administrator who exercised the authority normally enjoyed by an elected ...”

“... The Sand Pebbles, The Thomas Crown Affair, Bullitt – it was Robert Mitchum, his elder by 13 years and a star for more than twenty, who was voted the screen’s ‘godfather of cool’ on America’s university campuses.Both men had got to where they were by doing or seeming to do nothing. It was the ...”

“... the children that ‘we don’t kill unless there is a really good reason.’ He ended the talk by telling the children he hoped that they too would one day have the chance to become senior officers in the IDF.Our life worsens, poverty is spreading, education and health services are deteriorating, the middle class is shrinking, and we are ruled ...”

“... I will never, come hell or high water, let our distinctive British identity be lost in a federal Europe.’ John Major’s ringing assurance to last year’s Conservative Party Conference is part of a long tradition whereby Britishness has been defined primarily by reference to a real or an imaginary Other ...”

“... sway over scientific debate. Marine fossils found in the stones of the pyramids could no longer be explained away as remnants of the Flood; they were monuments of geological time that extended far beyond the records of ancient civilisations. The French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, thought that the Earth had been formed from the debris ...”

“... the foundations’ of independent local administration. Until then, most prisons had been run by local authorities. Conditions varied hugely: wealthier inmates at Holloway, such as W.T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, could pay six shillings to entrepreneurial jailers for a private cell and a ‘first-class’ stay. (‘Never had I a pleasanter ...”

“... least the ninth century CE, though Taoist alchemists, searching for both gold and immortality, had by then been aware of similar preparations for hundreds of years. A very early reference appears in the Zhenyuan Miaodao Yaolue (Classified Essentials of the Mysterious Tao of the True Origin of Things), a text attributed in part to the third-century alchemist ...”

“... of it really work?A sceptic could, of course, try to find out, through scientific experiment or by studying the deceptions of magicians, healers and witches. You might even try stepping into the sorcerer’s shoes, pantomiming their arts and seeing what happens. But there is a risk: what if, by play-acting as a ...”

“... only God can know the truth about the truth, most people assume that what we don’t know could be known by somebody looking hard and skilfully enough at the problem. I’m not sure if in the 21st century there is quantitively more in the world that isn’t known, but certainly we know that there is more we don’t ...”

“... Excitement was aroused by the announcement, last September, of a double discovery: the actual rules, on a cuneiform tablet, of a board game thought to date from 3300 BC, of which only some surviving boards had previously been known, and a living individual from a Jewish community in Cochin who had herself played that very game before she migrated to Israel, and could recall the rules in accordance with which she had then played it ...”

“... When you draw up a list of famous frogs in the history of the planet, it turns out to be pretty short. There’s the one who was only doing time as a frog, and there’s the one who was nothing more than a small felt glove puppet who went into show-business and hobnobbed with a lot of celebrities in the Seventies ...”

“... Knowing something of Argentina gives one no privileged insight, on 18 April 1982, into what should be done; it does give one a stronger desire to avoid a war, and a different awareness of some of the issues. Whatever happens to ships or governments, countries do not sink. In his Britain and Argentina in the 19th Century, published in 1960, Professor H ...”

“... that he tells us is that it was originally written in German, that it was translated into English by Daphne Hardy, an English sculptress who was living with Koestler at the time, that she invented its English title, that it enjoyed a great success in France when it was translated soon after the war as Le Zéro et l’Infini, and that it was dramatised in 1951 ...”

“... of Dryden to the mid-20th century, Dr Brewer argues, English literary culture has been dominated by what he calls ‘Neoclassicism’ – by a taste, that is, for the realistic representation of likely events. A.C. Bradley is in this sense a Neoclassical critic; and the most characteristic product of Neoclassical taste is ...”

“... when we are being shifted from him to her. The result is a blurred hagiography: Ingrid Bergman, to be sure, but softly flattering, the hard outlines left to the imagination. A pity, because Miss Bergman wants something from her readers. ‘lt could never happen today,’ she says in effect, referring to the world-shattering scandal of 1948, when she bolted ...”