“... the virtues of the Irish, as our father did. We were amused at this and often said, “Papa is more Irish than Mama and he never saw Ireland.” ’ Irish-Americans seem especially proud of their success, but they also cling to their feisty underdog image – even though there are 45 million of them. The political machine Moynihan described may no longer ...”

“... the very project of standardised diagnosis, especially of schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. More generally, it opposes the biomedical model of mental illness, to the exclusion of social conditions and life-course events. On a quite different score, Allen Frances, the chief editor of DSM-IV, has for years been blogging his criticisms of the modifications ...”

“... in the wood, his blood will not be traced while I live. The dimensions of the poem are all the more fully revealed if it is seen in relation to another mysterious lyric by Thomas Hardy which also exposes us to a sort of hallucinatory experience: One without looks in tonight   Through the curtain-chink From the sheet ...”

“... not being able to find out all about Paul Revere and how the Revolution began. Some books promise more than they deliver: Paul Revere’s Ride promises less. The famous ride is only a minor part of the book, which is a basic work about the outbreak of the Revolution at Lexington and Concord. The British commander-in chief, General ...”

“... neck), he had plenty to swear about. Kirsten Drotner has written a serious book about a subject more often approached with snootiness or levity: children’s ephemeral reading, its purposes and effects. She cautions us against judging the bulk of it unduly edifying to start with, or unduly obnoxious once the ‘penny dreadful’ type of paper had caught ...”

“... of under 20" it was certainly dryish. On the other hand, Professor Alexander Agassiz (son of the more illustrious Louis) had suggested that rainfall increases as cultivation and building disturb the electrical currents in the surrounding atmosphere, while Hardy W. Campbell, billed in the Milwaukee Road pamphlets as ‘the noted farming expert and inventor of ...”

“... less so in Southern Europe. France, indeed, seems to have been divided. Languedoc had larger and more complex households, especially in the mountains, than the rest of France. In spite of this important fact, the development of the Western European family can no longer be seen in the particular way which has been fashionable for the last generation, not even ...”

“... profound idea, but it has become what I think it always really was – a psychological cliche, no more than a fancy synonym for ordinary human confusions. Certainly Day-Lewis had his share of those during his life, but they don’t compose a significant pattern. A different shape is suggested by another phrase from Day-Lewis’s writings. In the preface to ...”

“... the concerns of anxious parents may not work, but listening to them, or seeming to, can cause more harm. In 1998, the French government temporarily suspended a school Hepatitis B vaccination programme to reassure the public that it was taking seriously (spurious) concerns about a link to multiple sclerosis. Vaccination rates fell, and even French doctors ...”

“... an Anglo-Spanish alliance. It was very much Gondomar’s own project, but James had proved far more enthusiastic than Philip. James now learned that the Spanish Government was planning to undertake a major naval expedition against the Muslim corsairs of Algiers and offered to contribute a number of warships to the expedition. British warships were as ...”

“... of retreating Iraqi columns in the first Gulf War, and after Abu Ghraib, such questions became more urgent; but you are more likely to ask questions about what you see than what you don’t. The non-circulation in the Western world of documentary footage of dead Iraqi civilians, and now of those Afghan villagers visited ...”

“... opportunity to sweep away this heap of broken images and start afresh. Or rather, start once more with the good old things, moving forward to a classical, orderly, tradition-bound past in the face of that squalid cult of anarchic subjectivism, self-expressive personality, economic laissez-faire, Protestant ‘inner light’ and Bolshevik subversion which ...”

“... of scholars. Alongside works such as Sophocles’ Trackers and the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, a sensation in the early years of the collection, Oxyrhynchus has yielded a student’s whiny letter to his father, legal petitions alleging everything from high crimes to petty acts of violence and endless accounts and receipts. Papyri have played a ...”

“... the New Orthodoxy. Monetarism had overthrown discredited Keynesianism, and nowhere was its victory more warmly welcomed than at Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street. Yet today things look a little different. Despite more than six years’ declared commitment to monetary discipline (even longer if we include the half-hearted ...”

“... Thomas Hobbes, in one of the best known and most abused phrases in the English language, described the life of man in a state of nature as ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short’. Less famous, but almost as notorious, is Hobbes’s contention that the relations between the states that human beings create in order to escape the misery of their natural condition are subject to nothing but the laws that produced that misery in the first place ...”