“... amazing, easy efficiency of the intellectual machine which ground away behind his wide temples and broad, smiling face’. Apart from Keynes’s memoir, there is, considering the warmth with which he was regarded, curiously little published material that gives any impression of Ramsey’s life and personality. His last hours are described very movingly by ...”

“... Near-East. They talk about Hittite Kings and the Citizens of Ur. From the window one can see broad-roofed Huguenot weaving-lofts outlined against Hawksmoor’s church. A mile or so beyond looms a larger sight that Rodinsky was spared: the 52 floors of Richard Seifert’s Natwest Tower, double-decker lifts, automatic ...”

“... Humphrey won the party’s nomination at a chaotic Democratic National Convention. And finally, Richard Nixon demonstrated how many second chances there are in American politics by winning the presidency only six years after telling reporters, following a humiliating defeat running to be governor of California, that he was retiring so they wouldn’t have ...”

“... himself, small, squat and full of Victorian bric-à-brac’. Of the four recent British giants of broad-gauge history, Adam Sisman has now studied three: Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Briggs, leaving only Eric Hobsbawm to Richard Evans. Briggs’s widow, Susan, commissioned Sisman to write this Life, and in fact the man ...”

“... to become governing rhetoric. At the office one morning at the end of August, I was approached by Richard Johnson, the editor of the New York Post’s gossip column, Page Six. Every day, a photocopied packet of the gossip columns from the national and local papers was prepared by the interns at George. This was one way to keep up with public versions of ...”

“... cost of both making and exhibiting, whether the works in question are the massive sculptures of Richard Serra, the lavish performances, films and installations of Matthew Barney, or the light-and-space extravaganzas of Olafur Eliasson. As a result, however international the clientele of high-end art might be, it remains highly exclusive: a tight system of ...”

“... Parliament. Even an inquiry created for a political purpose must be justified in other ways. Richard I created the office of coroner to augment the royal coffers with coroners’ fines. But the purpose of coroners isn’t to make money. There are, in broad terms, two kinds of justification for holding an inquiry. One ...”

“... highest benches of the Legislative Assembly. Neither the provincial geography of the book, nor its broad conclusions, would have displeased Georges Lefebvre, the interwar pioneer of history from below. What is lost in terms of the familiar drama of the revolution is gained in the portrayal of innumerable ordinary citizens who were obliged to pick sides and ...”

“... of faith – the Kirk’s Westminster Confession, a creed which made the 39 Articles look broad-minded.One person who shared Clough’s unconventional religious attitudes was Florence Nightingale, his cousin by marriage. Nightingale was delighted when Clough and Blanche Smith first got together and asked ...”

“... red wet/Thing I must somehow forget.’ A corporal with whom he had fallen in some kind of love, Richard Rhodes, was shot on sight when mistakenly trying to enter a German trench, and Gurney mourned his youth and beauty in ‘Dicky’: ‘Can Death, all slayer, kill/The fervent source of those exultant fires?/Nay, not so;/Somewhere that glow/And starry shine ...”

“... was already like the permanent head of a 20th-century foreign office. He invented policy over a broad range, and when officials went out to knock India into a modern shape, it was James Mill’s idea of that shape that they went out to implement. When the Northcote-Trevelyan committee inquired into the reform of recruitment and training for government ...”

“... sits a group of five single-storey concrete sheds with corrugated iron roofs, each opening onto a broad grassy enclosure. Dotted among the trees in the enclosures is an array of apparatus: platforms, posts, tripods, hammocks, swings. The enclosure in front of me also has a pool, and a bridge spanning a hoop of tunnel. At 2 p.m., a bell rings. The shed doors ...”

“... worked for Darwin among others, Hawkins worked on the Crystal Palace dinosaurs with the scientist Richard Owen, who had coined the word ‘dinosaur’ (from the Greek deinos, ‘terrible’, and sauros, ‘lizard’) in 1841. Theirs was the first attempt to revivify dry fossil bones and even drier scientific discourse for a large public. Though the sculptures ...”

“... portrait in Charles I: King and Collector, the Royal Academy’s current exhibition, you meet a broad canvas painted four years later. This tumultuous pictorial poem was delivered by Anthony Van Dyck within a few months of his arrival in London from Antwerp in 1632, and its theme is royal romance. It shows Charles and Henrietta Maria half-length, their ...”

“... before the war and advocated a federation of the world’s democracies, attracted the Tory MP Richard Law as well as supporters as diverse and unlikely as Bevin and the free-market economist Friedrich Hayek. Another groupuscule, Union and Reconstruction, foresaw a national rebirth which would end unemployment and hunger. This was outlined in the polemic ...”