“... Teeth exposed what Luttwak rightly calls the ‘tenth-century military renaissance’, and John Haldon, who has written extensively on Byzantine armies. Although Luttwak’s style reflects his journalism, his analyses are solidly rooted in recent Byzantine studies, which, as he observes in his preface, ‘have flourished as never before’. He ...”

“... but was already with Alfred and had recently had an affair and a child with the psychoanalyst Otto Gross, who briefly upset her by starting a relationship with her sister Frieda. (Frieda’s next husband but one was D.H. Lawrence.) Marianne and Else were at Weber’s bedside together when he died, aged 56, in 1920. Marianne died in Else’s arms at 84 in ...”

“... accurate assessment of poverty in India, calculating the earliest estimates of the country’s gross income per capita and showing that basic provisions for Indian prison inmates gave them a higher standard of living – on paper – than ordinary Indian peasants. In a series of publications including the much read pamphlet The Poverty of India, Naoroji ...”

“... whilst taking measurements in front of your man, but on his right side. To do so is to commit a gross piece of familiarity, rather offensive in all cases.’ My tailor was Kevin Levett, who apprenticed to Poole’s in 1989 at the age of 16 and is now a director at the firm. He has a waxed moustache and was wearing a charcoal three-piece suit, with a gold ...”

“... one of the very few bits of eroticism, if that is the word for it, in the Jewel (Urquhart shows a gross enough vein elsewhere), the description of Crichton’s consummation of his love. Thus for a while their eloquence was mute and all they spoke was but with the eye and hand, yet so persuasively, by vertue of the intermutual unlimitedness of their ...”

“... Many (I include myself) find that vision cheering. But it is a mirage. Plato was guilty of gross exaggeration. And his own case shows how even the most intellectual of Greeks could wallow in the glorious mud of religiosity. As for the sceptics, their very mockery itself testifies to the popular force of ritual and myth: there would have been little ...”

“... Can’t Happen Here); the directors Robert Rossen, Ken Burns and Stephen Zaillian; and the actors John Goodman and Sean Penn have all grappled with the Kingfish – Long’s nickname, after a black character on the radio show Amos ’n’ Andy who manipulated and cajoled his associates into various exploits. Randy Newman recorded two songs about him in ...”

“... says, he learned painting from a certain ‘Jean-Babeuf Audubon’, presumably a near relative of John James Audubon. On returning to England, he ‘lived the life of a rat’ for twenty years; he was eventually arrested in Bristol, accused of forgery and transported to Van Diemen’s Land. After causing maximum offence with a series of satirical paintings ...”

“... a counter-Fenian agency – Winston Churchill lambasted it in the House of Commons for its ‘gross boastfulness’: ‘It is written, if I may say so, in the style of “How Bill Adams Won the Battle of Waterloo”. The writer has been so anxious to show how important he was, how invariably he was right, and how much more he could tell if only his mouth ...”

“... loss of her daughter – that fixed her reputation.I never met Didion or her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, but in September 1974 I heard Didion speak one evening in the Branford College common room at Yale. Dunne was there as well, stepping in when her voice began to trail off. I was teaching a non-fiction seminar on Wednesday evenings that year ...”

“... against the authoritarian powers of China and Russia and has found an influential reader in John McCain, an old-style promoter of American toughness. But it’s now quite hard to imagine Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin, not to mention Osama bin Laden and other ‘enemies of the Free World’, quivering at the thought of a ‘concert of ...”

“... well as respecting him. If he thought them, like Hobsbaum, professionally competent despite their gross and obstinate follies, he would still back them when they applied for jobs. One belief he shared with some whom he scorned was that a university English department should be so constituted as to offer its undergraduates a wide variety of critical ...”

“... be altered to follow not what actually happened, but what ought to have done. Surely (in Ragtime) John Pierpont Morgan might have invited Henry Ford to lunch to talk about reincarnation; and why wouldn’t the anarchist Emma Goldman have given a full-body massage to the society divorcée Evelyn Nesbit (accompanied by a lecture on sexual politics)? These lines ...”

“... of Oxford, Museum of Natural History Here at last is an authority who considers it a ‘gross simplification’ to argue that the marble sculpture of ancient Greece and Rome was completely covered in opaque paint. Why, if this was always so, bother to extract and transport with such difficulty, and at such cost, the finest Parian marble? And why was ...”

“... a 1386 copy of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, or history of the world, now in the library of St John’s, Oxford, the text is followed not only by an index, but also by an account of how to use it: ‘This number, 72, indicates that the heading from the table can be found on the leaf where 72 is written in the top corner.’ Unfortunately, the scribe copied ...”