“... rice, canned peaches (imported from Michigan) and oatmeal. The new dining-hall itself was no more appropriate: instead of cool thatch, it had asphalt shingles and galvanised metal and a low roof that trapped the heat. Ford had always wanted to remake the world by integrating factory life and farming in a modern Arcadia. In the 1920s he tried to buy a ...”

“... that foreign observers viewed with a mixture of condescension and respect. Many Germans reacted more bitterly. Gervinus, Freiligrath and Börne were among the writers who likened Germany to Hamlet, a comparison instantly understood in a country that had come to regard Shakespeare as one of its own. Germans knew all about des Gedankens Blässe – the pale ...”

“... Textbook histories​ used to claim that independence in Africa was more or less complete by the mid-1960s. Decolonisation had lifted the white man’s burden and allowed African activists to strike out on their own – with a ceremonial nod to their European benefactors. But if this characterisation was absurd, so was the notion that colonial rule in Africa was an anomaly by the 1970s: millions of people, South Africans and Zimbabweans among them, were still battling white minority rule, and the struggle was becoming more intense as the Cold War drew on ...”

“... of Fire, wild-billowing, enwraps the World; with its fire-tongue licks at the very Stars.’ When Thomas Carlyle wrote these words in the 1830s, few people in the West doubted that the event he was describing, the French Revolution, counted as among the most important in human history. Some saw it as a deliverance, others as a catastrophe, but they agreed ...”

“... articles of commerce – 50,000 new titles a year, half a million titles in print, ten million or more stored in the copyright libraries. Even following the career of a single edition of a single book, as Darnton did, required a huge investment of scholarly time: 14 years as he reckoned. Most academics want a quicker return than this. As careers are rewarded ...”

“... a priori knowledge is knowledge as to ethical value ... We judge, for example, that happiness is more desirable than misery, knowledge than ignorance, goodwill than hatred, and so on. Such judgments must, in part at least, be immediate and a priori. Like our previous a priori judgments, they may be elicited by experience ... But it is fairly obvious that ...”

“... firm against vogues and panaceas, musical cocktails of all kinds, his work is proving rather more important than Schoenberg’s to composers at the century’s end. It is impossible to think of Sibelius’s music as in any way factitious, despite Simon Parmet’s claim that he used Golden Section proportions, just as Bartók and Debussy are supposed to ...”

“... new buildings and maze of yards, was a paradise for wanderers. With some relish, Haslam claims Thomas De Quincey as a prototype local raver: ‘He would get dosed up on Tuesdays and Saturdays and go out listening to music, carrying with him at all times “portable ecstasies”, tinctures of laudanum.’ Every time he passed a cotton mill on the city ...”

“... method. They might well have been subtitled ‘Reconsiderations’, a point which emerges more clearly if they are read, not in the order in which they are printed here, but in the order in which they were published. The earliest, which came out in 1971, is called simply ‘Prosopography’, and deals with the intellectual roots, the value and the ...”

“... Looking back over more than fifty years of publishing, I count myself lucky to have begun by working for Constant Huntington, chairman of Putnam, a Bostonian of soldierly appearance, blessed with an air of extraordinary propriety, but a man of paradox. He was a self-confessed snob who enjoyed moving in what he called ‘the great world’, by which he meant the narrow orbit of country houses and fashionable quasi-literary circles where he believed the best writers were to be met ...”

“... ahead is fairly humdrum.’ Nothing could be further from the truth: although the outcome is no more in doubt than that of a Classical tragedy – the final chapter is written not by Costantini but by Amnesty International – the skill and compassion with which Francisco Sanctis’s lonely battle with himself is described, and the evocation of the ...”

“... was erratic, dependent on the variable enthusiasm of individuals such as Carnot, Hoche and Bruix. More important, France under the Directory was barely a revolutionary polity. Driven by force of circumstance, it was descending from idealistic internationalism into chauvinistic imperialism. The hostility of the other great powers, culminating in the Second ...”

“... an attractive option for young men who didn’t have the connections to establish themselves in more traditional professions, or who had damaged their reputations early and were looking for a way out or a second chance). The vast growth of the British army during the Napoleonic Wars – and its high attrition rates – made room for hundreds of new ...”

“... fires of hell’. The Church frowns on masturbation, but the code of Mexican machismo is more permissive, even allowing for deviations from heterosexuality: a limited range of acts is licensed for men clearly labelled as gay and inferior. It turns out these acts are not only convenient but addictive.The police beat up suspects as a matter of ...”

“... a contraction not just of time, the daylight hours, but of possibility. Everything grows more chromatic: the late sunshine, the shop windows, the cars. And then evening arrives like an orange rolling off a table.’ Or this. Someone who may or may not be Specktor is on a date with Q, a television writer:We sat for three and a half hours, after which ...”