“... moral support and personal appearances rather than substantial regular subscriptions or occasional major benefactions. She concentrated on organisations concerned with women and children; he was more interested in educational schemes and the problems of poverty. Together, they spent a great deal of time on these good causes: perhaps more, Prochaska ...”

“... Ababa to relinquish its access to the Red Sea. The Eritreans, whose strategic position is the major source of their sorrows, have offered Ethiopia a corridor to the coast after independence. This appears to have cut no ice. Any Ethiopian regime must also be aware that the loss of Eritrea would set a grim precedent for the empire, despite convincing ...”

“... German interests were on a collision course. As the biographers of Baldwin, Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, observed, ‘the government had awakened to a danger that had nothing to do with any question of marriage.’ Charles Higham quotes an FBI file in Washington: ‘Certain would-be state secrets were passed on to Edward, and when it was found that ...”

“... Convention was a glamorous performance. But at one point, trying to reproach the Democrats with John Adams’s phrase ‘Facts are stubborn things,’ he slipped and declared instead: ‘Facts are stupid things.’ At the moment he wished to invoke an intransigent, incontrovertible reality which would supposedly confound his enemies and bear out the ...”

“... He parcelled out his Beagle specimens to white-collar naturalists: to zoological craftsmen like John Gould (who reciprocated by christening a new rhea darwinii after him). Darwin modelled his Zoology on Humboldt’s Zoologie, acting as taskmaster and paymaster chivvying a Gradgrind work-force. Not that he was incapable of such work himself. Although in ...”

“... was active in her twenties and thirties in radical political circles, and along with her husband, John Fenwick, an Irish patriot and member of the London Corresponding Society, became friends with William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft around the time of the French Revolution. One of the few – haunting – pieces of biographical information we have about ...”

“... unable to understand or to deal with. Still, this strange phenomenon should remind us of the major characteristic of history which it exemplifies: the incredible shortness of memory of both the theorists and practitioners of economics. Posner, cheerfully oblivious of history, claims that economic method enables us ‘to construct and test models of ...”

“... And she gives cameo parts to the royal entourage and its hangers-on: Lord Snowdon, Raine Spencer, Major Ronald Ferguson, Koo Stark, James Hewitt, Madam Vasso and the rest. Thus described by Kelley, the House of Windsor is part Evelyn Waugh, part Tom Sharpe, wholly Spitting Image. It is not so much that she descends to personalities as that she is incapable of ...”

“... English institutions and wanted to preserve them exactly as they were. He was shocked when Sir John Donaldson, in charge of the National Industrial Relations Court, dispensed with gown and wig: wigs, gowns and flummery were the essence of the law. He not only opposed any notion that the free-market principles preached to the rest of the nation might apply ...”

“... Scanlon and Thomas Pogge from the Kantian, Gerald Cohen, Brian Barry, the economists Amartya Sen, John Roemer and Partha Dasgupta, all get a nod in a footnote at most, and we hear nothing informative about how their arguments would be addressed. Major historical contributors such as Kant, Bentham and Adam Smith don’t even ...”

“... Museum) and the National Gallery. Piero della Francesca was a figure of special interest for both John Charles Robinson, an agent for South Kensington as well as for private collectors, and Charles Eastlake, the first director of the National Gallery, because of the extreme rarity of his portable pictures. There was only one work by him in any public – or ...”

“... made him. He built his theory out of information physically extracted from others.’ In the other major recent English-language biography, Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin (1991), the events in Darwin’s life were juxtaposed with the great social and political upheavals of his times: Darwin against the background of the Chartists, the Crystal ...”

“... it. Even the man who was to become the most famous of the early English captives in America, John Smith, who had been ‘rescued’ from the Algonquin chief, Powhatan, by his daughter Pocahontas (playing Medea to Smith’s Jason), had first been captured by the Turks and sold as a slave in Istanbul. The continuity of the stories of the Empire from the ...”

“... white, ethereal cloud’. Depending on the setting and production-run, $75 to $200 would get you John F. Kennedy, Napoleon or Marilyn Monroe on your finger. Dancing Naked is partly an autobiography, mostly an explosive voiding of rheum on the idiocies of contemporary science and culture. Mullis presents himself as a professional eccentric, a voice crying in ...”

“... a few islands of stability but a great many more archipelagos of uncertainty and confusion; a few major works but a great many more minor works with an obsessive attachment to particularity and a disregard for conventional aesthetics, which are replaced by a spirit of documentary reportage, investigative journalism and idiosyncratic record-keeping. Take the ...”