“... sentiment, Martha,’ he beams. Martha wears the same gloomy sub fusc, with black bonnet and broad linen collar. Putting slang in puritan mouths is fun because we know that precision and decorum in speech were hallmarks of righteousness. Puritans were sticklers, who defied Satan, abolished Christmas and hunted witches. Priggish and sexless, they were ...”

“... purposive, energetic-sounding verb ‘moved into’, is meaningless unless it is explained that William Golding’s The Paper Men was a late, and lame, novel of remarkable thinness by an old famous author about being a famous author. It was metafictional only in the way that reality TV is metatelevisual. Stevenson never reflects on a writer’s aesthetic ...”

“... our common European heritage, and our debt to this heritage in the past and the future’. Such a broad, serious and fundamentally political claim makes this book more than mere necromancy. Filial piety plays a role, but Murray has his eye on bigger themes, including the purpose of historical study and the future (if it has one; Murray is pessimistic on that ...”

“... ideas accumulate into a body of positive philosophy. His philosophy is practical, realistic, broad-ranging, subtle. It is equipped to destroy errors, but it is not purely reactionary. Although Medawar nowhere states his philosophy as a whole, it does exist, and can be gathered together and expressed. Medawar accepts what he (and others) call the ...”

“... have lived since 1910. Again and again, he argues that ‘19th-century anti-sensualism had a very broad base,’ that it consisted of ‘a set of widely held values which commanded wide assent’ and that it was ‘a widely and warmly embraced creed’. He accepts that prudery was ‘a real phenomenon’, notably among middle-class groups, where verbal and ...”

“... in the Oxford Union. The man who in old age was to be both revered and mocked as the People’s William started out with the firm conviction that ‘the majority will be in the wrong.’ And the startling steps by which he found himself among the Liberals were interpreted by many of his associates not as a journey of honest discovery but as timeserving in ...”

“... palpable by the end of Victoria’s reign. That is the framework of a book whose merits are its broad scope and vivid detail rather than cogent argument. This is to be expected, perhaps, once Hunt has warned us that he will concentrate on ideas. ‘Too much recent urban history,’ he says, ‘has retreated into a tale of bureaucratic development – of ...”

“... in trust and sign over his house in Chelsea to his daughter Margaret Roper and her husband, William. The works More wrote while imprisoned in the Tower were an eloquent and intricate account of one man’s faith and its trials, but they are also suffused with longing for the family he missed.More didn’t just love his family, he also educated ...”

“... the term adds to our understanding of colonial intelligence work. All colonial states are, in this broad sense, ‘intelligence states’. In fact, given the distance between the rulers and ruled in the French and British metropoles in the 1920s and 1930s, the effort to infiltrate and control domestic left-wing working-class movements and their leadership, and ...”

“... Yohji Yamamoto manner. Krier by contrast wears a lot of linen, and he has the wire-frame glasses, broad-brimmed hats and neck stock associated with minor characters in Merchant Ivory adaptations. He keeps his hair in a bird’s nest and has a vaguely clerical air. But despite his mild appearance, Krier is an architect with a violent edge to his ...”

“... as systole), when blood is forced out of the ventricles and into the arteries. These valves are so broad they have thick cords like harp strings attached to their cusps to reinforce them. The second sound is made by the other two valves – the pulmonary and aortic – as they prevent backflow while the ventricles refill (diastole). Healthy cardiac valves ...”

“... Modern classicists have tended to focus on the Amazons in myth, as the subtitle of a 1984 book by William Blake Tyrrell – Amazons: A Study in Athenian Mythmaking – attests. But the balance had begun to swing back towards ethnography before Tyrrell’s work appeared. In the 1960s, archaeologists excavating the many kurgans, or burial mounds, that dot the ...”

“... So it’s only bloodshot from gravity, because he’s been lying on that side after he died.’ In William Ewing’s book of photo-portraits, The Body (1994), there is an image of a naked woman who looks as if she is sleeping, but closer inspection reveals that her torso has been slit open: a Y-shaped laceration, neatly stitched, a cut from each shoulder ...”

“... to pay the electricity bill. Ian was my first British friend – a man of liberal sympathies, broad understanding, and a desire to spend vacations in West Germany. Despite the many years since our last conversation, I often find myself nostalgically drifting back to West Parade. The hellish North Sea wind tore through the third-floor apartment every day ...”

“... new information, which incidentally does not greatly enlarge the sum of human knowledge about the broad story of the Cambridge spies. He has not been taken for a ride: rather, he provides a treasury of personal detail, not least about Philby’s life in Moscow, the pin-striped suit and red braces he wore to his favourite Georgian restaurant, his skill at ...”