“... the habit of rebellion, not expunged it. At her death, restive nobles grabbed again at royal powers ‘like coals’ – as one of them remarked – ‘from a dying fire’. Peggy Liss makes this strenuous reign seem too easily triumphant, but she gets us closer to her subject than any previous biographer has. Isabella shared the common aristocratic ...”

“... to become the 51st state; a ban on private cars in Manhattan; free public bicycles; devolution of powers over policing, education, housing and welfare to neighbourhood authorities; a casino on Coney Island or Roosevelt Island to generate tax revenue; and something called ‘Sweet Sundays’, one day each month on which all mechanical transportation, including ...”

“... project to Warner Brothers. The whole cringe-making story is told in The Man Who Heard Voices by Michael Bamberger (Gotham, 2006). He describes a painful supper at which Shyamalan joins a group of Disney executives: ‘What are you saying, Nina? What are you saying the script needs? Three weeks? Three months?’ Nina said nothing. Her face said: Not three ...”

“... the average Yugoslav and why the average Scot earns less than the average English man or woman. Michael Porter’s The Competitive Advantage of Nations is audacious (or foolhardy) enough to offer an answer. Its aim is nothing less than a systematic explanation of the wealth of nations, with 52 pages of policy recommendations added on for good ...”

“... off a convincing snarl. Yet he is remembered for certain qualities which appreciate over time. Michael Wreszin’s biography succeeds in spite of its invocation of the conservative revolutionary. While a genuine radical like James Cameron could famously say of himself that he was ‘conservative about everything except politics’, and while it’s true ...”

“... the cards, while others, though manifestly irrational, were nonetheless unavoidable. He had acute powers of observation, and a gift for aphorism akin to that of the moralists of the 18th century, among whom he belonged in more than one way. Commenting on the tacit acceptance of the division of Europe in the first years after 1945 he wrote that ‘le statu quo ...”

“... other icons now under Japanese management include the Rockefeller Center, Universal Studios and Michael Jackson. Such high-profile acquisitions are seized upon by opportunistic commentators, all too keen to foster suspicions of Japanese duplicity, racism and greed. Writing about Japan, its society and its foreign affairs has to an overwhelming degree become ...”

“... and intellectually progressive than the religion he knew at home. He didn’t mention the magical powers sannyasins like himself enjoyed; he celebrated the holiness of Hindu women, while glossing over the plight of child brides. For Harris, these things matter mainly because they suggest that Vivekananda didn’t aim at the systematic consistency that ...”

“... the ‘hallucinations’ of past ages were founded on truths, not error. They dimly captured powers that were supernormal, rather than supernatural, because they proceeded from an ‘X region of our nature’, which science had yet to investigate.Whereas historians of religion today enlist anthropologists to make sense of their sources, Lang invoked the ...”

“... sort of poetry that Fenton writes, and that is also written, in their various ways, by Fuller, by Michael Hofmann, Tom Paulin, Christopher Reid and others. Certainly the romantic rhetoric that is second nature to Larkin, as to Auden, Yeats and Eliot, has no place in their poetic repertoire. It once seemed so ‘natural’, but beside their literariness and ...”

“... expense. How did it then happen that he found himself involved in a war with the Western Powers? It was a good enough question, and Taylor’s answer was a coherent one, based on better documentation than his opponents had. True, he overstated his position. It was an unnecessary provocation to say that war broke out in September 1939 because Hitler ...”

“... is a branch of psychopathology at least as plausible as Adam Smith’s faith in the harmonising powers of the Invisible Hand. The most crucial (and piquant) irony of the debt crisis is that it arrived just as the Invisible Hand was making its biggest comeback in fifty years. In this age of Reaganomics and Thatcherism, when the ‘new realism’ of the ...”

“... was a tape-recorded conversation between Hamilton and the First Secretary to the Treasury, Michael Heseltine, in which Hamilton denied any ‘financial relationship’ with Ian Greer. Greer knew he had paid, and realised his fellow plaintive would be exposed in court as a liar. He told Hamilton he wanted to fight the case separately, with a new set of ...”

“... badly Edward mishandled Warwick, showering him with rewards early in the reign, delegating huge powers to him north of the Trent and in Calais, then clipping his wings. Warwick learned to tolerate the bluff William Hastings, a Leicestershire squire whom Edward made his principal fixer and chief pimp, but was then blindsided by the king’s clandestine ...”

“... trials, the law officers claimed that the LCS was leading a plot to depose the King and usurp the powers of government, but the juries rejected this claim each time it was put before them, no doubt because it relied on arguments about what would count as usurpation and deposition which were figurative and technical to the point of absurdity. On at least two ...”