“... 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 ...”

“... problem is more acute with the American Constitution, a spare document many of whose clauses are broad statements of general principle, than with modern counterparts such as the lengthy and highly detailed new Constitution of South Africa, which seeks to anticipate almost every conceivable problem and circumstance that may arise in the ...”

“... The term ‘constitutional monarchy’ is bandied about as if it always meant the same thing. William of Orange was a constitutional monarch; so is Elizabeth II. The powers, rights, and obligations accruing to each are, of course, very different. Even written constitutions are subject to different interpretations at different times (as the extension of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a demand for intelligibility and reassurance, an insistence on them. A comparison can be made with William James, writing about these matters a little over a hundred years ago in his book Pragmatism. For James, who embraced Darwinism, the problem was not materialism’s past, but its future. Physics foretold a future in which all life would eventually die out ...”

“... struggle under the oil slick of the Gulf, in a picture grislier than – but indebted to – William Carlos Williams’s poem of 1930s class struggle ‘The Yachts’. And then Rich addresses herself: From shores of sickness you lie out on listless waters with no boundaries  floodplain without horizon dun skies mirroring its opaque face and nothing not ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that includes ‘the entire spectrum of attempts to rectify historical injustices’. This is so broad a definition as to verge on meaninglessness. Nor does it help when restitution is referred to variously as a ‘beacon of morality’, ‘an adjudicator of national identity and ethnicity’, and ‘not merely a moral idea but a political and social ...”

“... in the 19th, and stutters to a halt with the hanging of two Second World War collaborators, William Joyce (the despised Lord Haw-Haw, who was born in the United States, was brought up in Ireland and on the basis of long residence had acquired a British passport) and John Amery (scion of a High Tory family, who had moved to Germany after the outbreak of ...”

“... but to use their theories to leave the world a better place than they found it. Their leader is William MacAskill, a 28-year-old lecturer at Oxford. As graduate students MacAskill and his friend Toby Ord committed themselves to donate most of their future earnings to charity (in MacAskill’s case anything above £20,000, in Ord’s £18,000), and set ...”

“... after his death, do not disguise an essential seediness. It is noted by his first biographer, William Cooke, that he ‘took snuff in such quantities as often rendered him a very slovenly beau’. Variously called the ‘Hogarth of the stage’ and the ‘English Aristophanes’ – in both cases rather flatteringly – Foote included among his fans Dr ...”

“... their legs trussed with a farmer’s rope. Enjoying the sport are Englishmen in shirtsleeves and broad-brimmed hats, their grins set off by heavy moustaches. Schreiner’s husband, Samuel Cronwright, had found the photograph in the window of a barber shop in Kimberley, the diamond-mining town in the north of the Cape Colony. It had been taken in Southern ...”