“... they expected to fight them in Texas as well. They probably didn’t realise, however, that their grant from the Mexican government had placed them deep in Comanchería, the area of the South-West controlled by the Comanches, or that the Mexicans intended to use the rapidly growing colonies of English-speaking settlers from the US (known as Anglos) to create ...”

“... by the wayside to dip into it.’ My great-grandfather soon discovered Oliver Goldsmith and Thomas De Quincey. ‘The beauty of the prose poems and neatness of the humour was such as I had never before met with.’ The practical mysteries of propagation and grafting now cohabited with another less focused compulsion, the urge to write. The village boy ...”

“... They think of themselves as continuing the struggle against mystificatory nonsense that Thomas Huxley waged against Bishop Wilberforce, Russell against Bergson, and Carnap against Heidegger. These philosophers still award a special ontological status (‘fundamental reality’) to the elementary particles discovered by the physicists. They believe ...”

“... Poetry Center in order to establish a reading series (a recent phenomenon popularised by Dylan Thomas) and archive. Auden stayed with Ruth Witt-Diamant, the Poetry Center’s founding director, and, in return for his considerable largesse, asked only that he be delivered to gay bars where he might meet young Jewish American males with blond hair. Thom Gunn ...”

“... following the pan-Protestant principle of sola scriptura. All good Protestants, therefore, should grant him the freedom to make his argument, and should be willing to assess it without prejudice. Then follows ‘On the Son of God’, the longest, most argumentative and most heretical chapter in the book.The agreement in doctrine between De Doctrina Christiana ...”

“... of the worst thing you could do’. And here is Hardwick at the public library discovering Thomas Mann, whose Death in Venice has been mis-shelved in the murder mystery section. (A lesser woman would have put it back.) In 1934, she went to the University of Kentucky, where she sought out ‘the literary people and the political people’. ‘I have a ...”

“... East Coast filmmakers hurried West to seek maximum sunlight and maximum separation from Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company, which demanded copyright payment or else a bullet in the expensive newfangled movie cameras. The canyons and ravines of the Hollywood Hills were the natural redoubts against the Patents Company ...”

“... in 1838 – a Scottish naval captain had given the islanders the world’s first constitution to grant all men and all women the vote – is to see a handful of defenceless folk and their pigs wandering among the trees, and to hear the immensity of the Pacific breaking on the shore. But it’s not an empty immensity for Colley: ‘As regards constitutional ...”

“... so creatively if the book had not made a huge impression ten years before. The witty knight – as Thomas Shelton, Cervantes’s contemporary and most sinewy English translator, termed Don Quixote – had ridden instantly into the world’s imagination along with his squire. Even so, Cervantes may have had one reason at least to be grateful to the apocryphal ...”

“... books, as if the single plump syllable had a taboo spell on it. The idea may be to refuse to grant the name power, a quixotic argument since power is what Trump has. The effect – ‘He wants to build a wall. It will have a beautiful door, he says’ – isn’t to shrink Trump to his proper dimensions but to make recent history unrecognisable. How far ...”

“... to religious reform as an avaricious scheme aimed at confiscating episcopal property. The maverick Thomas Nashe still felt it was worth making this allegation in Piers Penniless His Supplication to the Devil in 1592, when Leicester had been safely dead for four years, and Nashe wasn’t the only non-Catholic to share the lasting animus which informs ...”

“... a sort of new-variant liberalism, has claimed a number of prominent victims, including John Rawls, Thomas Nagel, Dworkin, Bruce Ackerman, Brian Barry and even Jürgen Habermas.Surprisingly, Gray pays little attention to it, mentioning the idea only as a historical aberration. It poses problems for him, however, since it cuts across his two-face ...”

“... founding treaty was delayed until April 1949 so that Harry Truman could fight off a challenge from Thomas E. Dewey in the 1948 US presidential election. Britain requested that the treaty be signed in Barbados; Portugal suggested the Azores as a symbolic mid-Atlantic location; but the US insisted on Washington and so it was. Say what you will of the Delian ...”

“... and races were staged with unprecedented intensity in such media ‘events’ as the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, and the David Duke campaign. Conspiracy theories detailed the infiltration of American higher education by ‘politically correct’ militants, and lamented the takeover of the art world by feminists, homosexuals and ethnic ...”

“... yet with an intense analytical focus. Among current practitioners of the social sciences only Thomas Schelling and Amos Tversky come to mind as demonstrating to the same extent Hirschman’s quality of controlled imagination. Yet Hirschman is not a part of the social-science establishment. This has nothing to do with his European origins. Many of the ...”