“... at 1990 prices, crude had gone from $4.50 a barrel in 1970 to nearly $25 in 1973, had reached more than $45 in 1979, and was back to about $10. It was the wildest fluctuation since production had begun in Pennsylvania in the 1860s. Yergin sets out to tell the entire story: more exactly, to tell the story as it might he ...”

“... to ‘make artificiall lightning in their heavens’. At times the play seemed to generate a power more than dramatic. At one performance in Shoreditch the wooden walls of the theatre suddenly ‘crackt’ and ‘frighted the audience.’ At another, in Exeter, the players stopped dead in the middle of the conjuration scene, ‘for they were all perswaded ...”

“... Arctic exploration for four decades – of humble stock and attracted to persons, like Parry, more to the manor born, stubborn in defending his own often wrong ideas, high-handed in his use of power. And there is William Scoresby, a whaling captain and brilliant amateur scientist who knew more about the Arctic than all ...”

“... becoming part of history. One wonders to what use Bataille’s work will be put as it becomes more widely available in English, especially in the haphazard form its availability is taking. He was a fragmentary writer, but his many works are all chips off the same block – or, to use a more Bataillean image, fluids ...”

“... Throughout it manifests a breadth of reading and depth of erudition of formidable extent. What is more important still is that it must, if Aarsleff is right, radically alter our understanding of the intellectual history of modern linguistics. And that means our grasp of the world of ideas in which we live. Few will disagree with Aarsleff that the history of ...”

“... the Second World War. Suspecting that Attlee had been underrated, he embarked on a biography. The more he discovered of that enigmatic character, the more favourable the opinion he formed of him. The thesis running through his book is that Attlee was a great and good influence in the affairs both of his party and of his ...”

“... bestowing only brief attention, and most of that negative, on anything currently going on. He is more likely to cite a colleague for achieving a howler than an insight, and indeed much of the fun to be had from reading Ricks derives from his favourite pursuit of spot-checking his colleagues’ work for mistakes. In this book perhaps a score of scholars are ...”

“... subaltern talking about Buck House, or your father-in-law telling you how his new golf clubs cost more but aren’t as good as his old ones. Other people are Hell (I have never seen why Sartre should have been praised for inverting and falsifying this truism), and the self-important spongers of Venice no more so than the ...”

“... illustrious wisdom of the Great Cham. This case was most damagingly pressed in the 19th century by Thomas Babington Macaulay, who saw Boswell as a wine-bibbing, plate-licking reprobate, the very smallest of men, who somehow wrote a great biography by accident. This view has been corrected somewhat by the serial publication of Boswell’s private papers, which ...”

“... inequality like Stephan Thernstrom, advocates of a social-anthropological approach such as Keith Thomas, partisans of a politically committed history of everyday life like Raphael Samuel and the History Workshop, and more besides. The world of history seemed then to be not just expanding but exploding, into areas undreamed ...”

“... being hit, Basil, it’s the frightening effect of shells etc that make you so nervy. I’m much more nervy today than when I first came out. The shift in the tenor of the thirty-odd letters of Aubrey’s I possess is striking. They are full of reportage, no better and no worse than tens of thousands of published examples of such correspondence. He describes ...”

“... as conclusive proof that her faith in mesmeric treatment was an illusion. Later that same month, Thomas Spencer Wells, a prominent specialist in ovarian diseases, delivered a lecture on the case to the Clinical Society of London, in which he described the growth itself – displayed for the audience together with a specimen bottle of its contents – as ...”

“... of revolutionary ideologies and ideas, including liberalism and nationalism, as well as the more esoteric Saint-Simonianism and freemasonry. Yet as Maurizio Isabella shows in this transformational account of the Mediterranean uprisings of the 1820s, Southern Europe was also a distinct geopolitical space, influenced by the rival forces of French and ...”

“... from France (still commonly regarded as the end of the Hundred Years’ War), he sank for more than a year into a catatonic stupor and was wholly unable to govern. The squabble over the protectorate – should it be Henry’s ‘strong-laboured’ queen, Margaret of Anjou, or Edmund, duke of Somerset, or Richard, duke of York? – was controversially ...”

“... in Barcelona in the autumn of 1936. Charles was 30, a serious fellow from Michigan; Lois was 19, more or less fresh from Kentucky. They had married earlier in the year and decided on a honeymoon in Europe. In Catalonia, a matter of weeks after Franco’s military uprising against the Second Spanish Republic, they settled happily into a political climate of ...”