“... to tell. Naturally he is scathing about the British (and foreign) banks’ lavishing of money on Robert Maxwell twenty years after the Board of Trade had stigmatised him as unfit to run a public company; hundreds of non-bankers could have told them he was a crook. But Taylor’s book makes clear that this sort of misjudgment is what one should expect from ...”

“... and her determination to make her argument accessible to those without any legal training is a self-consciously political act. Her introduction promises that legal terms will be explained as needed and directs the reader in addition to a useful glossary of such terms at the back; only on a very few occasions did I stumble across a word that eluded either ...”

“... of brooding about America and Europe, the past and the future, art and society, influence and self-reliance, was coming to a head in a gush of discussion. The issues raised by the Regionalists, the Mexican muralists, by the question of abstract art, or by Surrealism, were all pointing in the same direction – towards the definition of a truly American ...”

“... transgression, gaiety transfiguring all that dread. Yet Greenblatt, having with whatever degree of self-awareness accomplished the fundamental shift from determinism to a random multiplicity, finds himself faced with a phase of history in which the end seems indeed to be inscribed in the beginning, in which the dice are loaded and all fall one way. There is a ...”

“... to the textbook view that John Locke’s contractual theory of government simply demolished Robert Filmer’s efforts at assimilating the authority of kings and fathers, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government did not drive patriachal ideas out of circulation. Indeed, it was Locke who was hardly read in the early 18th century: his ideas struck no ...”

“... the dogma of ‘consensus’, which in its turn is another aspect of the whole system’s loss of self-confidence. Newspapers which once cheered or booed the rival teams as they contended now conceive the football ground itself to be in need of defence. Evil men are crawling forward, determined to tear up the weedy old turf. Scargill, Benn, Ken ...”

“... Scottish control of the trade to England was a valuable source of revenue. Scots have long held self-congratulatory beliefs about their educational system. It is claimed that in the 18th and 19th centuries it was a bond, with all social classes using the parish school, and at the same time a source of social mobility so far as it enabled the ‘lad ...”

“... that, had he wished, he could have been the winner). Afterwards, when I told my fellow students (self-professed intellectuals to a man) how I had spent that day, I was struck by their lack of interest in the author of Regain and Que ma joie demeure as compared to their curiosity about Fachleitner, le berger de Manosque. Some years later, when I was living by ...”

“... Szakall.Before Auden came on the scene Chester had taken the fancy of a New York financier, Robert King (‘not his real name’). King duly enrolled as a patient with Dr Kallman, and after a little bridgework had broken the ice, invited the dentist to supper at the Astor Roof. There was presumably some routine orthodontic small talk (‘How’s the ...”

“... of the value of scholarly knowledge to common life is given momentary substance. This largely self-educated bookseller’s son, scarred by scrofula, partially blind and deaf, afflicted by obsessive thoughts as well as a constitutional melancholy which he claimed made him ‘mad all his life, at least not sober’, prone to compulsive movements, rituals ...”

“... Ada Kennard, a dancer in a three-women act that toured the music halls. His father was a Bob: Robert Moffat Livingstone, at different times a seafarer, a window cleaner and a stagehand. According to their son, the couple hadn’t wanted children. Then one night in September 1944, Bob ran out of condoms. The memoirist writes of his conception, ‘With ...”

“... is now writing a soon-to-be-bestselling crime novel with plenty of sex and murder. Her husband, Robert, often rudely called ‘Rob’ by unthinking friends, is a highly adapted commuting machine who works in Canary Wharf and times his drive to the station to perfection. She is interesting, he is not. And they have a child, Lanny, who is both interesting and ...”

“... first nights, she seldom fails to tell the producer or director how much she loathed the show. To Robert Evans, producer of Love Story, at the Royal Command Performance of the film: ‘Tony saw Love Story in New York. Hated it.’ When Dennis Main Wilson says, ‘Ma’am, I have the honour to produce a little show called Till Death Us Do Part,’ she cuts ...”

“... race.’ ‘This calm declaration of a dying man was so well calculated to do mischief,’ wrote Robert Southey, who was among the crowd that morning. It convinced Southey that ‘revolution must inevitably come, and in its most fearful shape.’ Many had arrived at the same conclusion. Through the 1790s, war with France had ground towards a costly and ...”

“... case, a technical prerequisite. You need an A-bomb to ignite an H-bomb, and the lab’s Director Robert Oppenheimer reasonably enough felt that the race to forestall the Nazis required no distractions from the main lines of development. Destructive friction between fusion and fission was reduced by giving Teller what was essentially a roaming brief, and it ...”