“... of the film only lives for me (only perks up) when Perkins is on screen, doing nervy battle with Martin Balsam’s Arbogast (the scene had to be slowed down with extra reaction shots during editing to allow the audience to keep up with their lightning ad-libbing, Durgnat tells us), and even the plodding John Gavin has one quite lively scene. As evidence of ...”

“... existential fear and trembling. (Subtext in these opening paragraphs: having inordinate if not Martin Amis-like dental bills of late – on top of all the moving expenses – have decided to come out as auto-odontophobe.) Life really would be simpler without them. Just gum everybody to death. One’s own, one gathers, are going to outlast one. Obviously ...”

“... relations, energy security and global trade are explored in The Future History of the Arctic by Charles Emmerson.* But the idea that a thawing Arctic is something to be afraid of would have baffled our ancestors. For the men who sailed from Europe in search of a northwest passage, and for the men who sent them, the ice was what there was to fear, and a ...”

“... The votive spectre, sentimentalised, inflated, patched into every available blank space, was Charles Spencer Chaplin: ‘London’s world famous star’. Child vagrant. Global-franchise tramp. Swiss domiciled millionaire guardian of his own archive. Author of a myth-making autobiography exploiting the nexus of these streets. The fable of Chaplin’s ...”

“... rules. Most states became states because of external threats, or, in the words of the sociologist Charles Tilly: ‘War made the state, and the state made war.’ By contrast, the EU as we know it has grown out of a market project; states may be able to make a market, but a market won’t make a state. The European elites simply do not agree on what it would ...”

“... and the NBC show forms the backbone of Alan Bleasdale’s play. ‘Older Presley’ – played by Martin Shaw in purple pyjamas – clutches an attaché case of medications to his side, ceasing abruptly from soliloquy and self-pity to gaze spellbound at his lithesome former self. At one point, Presley, who is attended around the clock by minions, halts the ...”

“... but arranged so that they are of the greatest benefit to the least advantaged, philosophers like Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge have sought to apply Rawls’s theory of justice to the whole world. However, they have a dissenter within their ranks, and in a series of articles Mathias Risse has proved an articulate critic of those who seek to exploit the ...”

“... joined a group called Pat T. Cake and His Mighty Panthers. Soul music was coming into its own. Ray Charles was recording for Atlantic Records; Sam Cooke had left the Soul Stirrers; James Brown was touring with his Famous Flames. But Otis Redding wasn’t a soul singer yet. Billed as Otis ‘Rockin’ Redding or ‘Rockhouse Redding’, he sang rock and roll ...”

“... of America are located in the writings, in turn, of Frances Trollope, Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens (gathered in Chapter Two under the heading ‘Institutional America’), Oscar Wilde and Rupert Brooke (‘Aesthetic America’), Kipling and R.L. Stevenson (‘Epic (and Chivalric) America’), H.G. Wells (‘Futuristic America’), D.H. Lawrence ...”

“... waging it, and there are women, too, sometimes centre-stage though more often in the background. Martin Middlebrook’s The First Day on the Somme and John Keegan’s The Face of Battle are the mini-masterpieces I remember from school; this century, Antony Beevor, Max Hastings and Holland have led the British pack. The history of war is now certainly more ...”

“... life to understanding one particular, defunct figure. Cohabitation with the dead is not easy: Martin Gilbert has been living with Churchill for two decades; Dumas Malone has been communing with Jefferson for even longer. The demands of such single-minded scholarly devotion should not be underestimated. Bad biographies may be easy to write: good ones are ...”

“... David Fieldhouse examines how far it promoted economic development or under-development. Ged Martin and Benjamin Kline discuss emigration and identities. John MacKenzie supplies a piece on imperial art. Finally, Marshall, followed by an Australian, an African and an Indian, offer their own, inevitably different, verdicts on Empire’s ...”

“... it is a history of coercion and control. The figure who emerges from it most strongly is John Charles McQuaid, the Archbishop of Dublin between 1940 and 1972, who stopped Noel Browne, the Minister for Health in 1951, from introducing a health scheme for mothers, thereby bringing down the Government, and who insisted that John McGahern be fired from his ...”

“... of many recent liberals writing in the analytical tradition, such as Brian Barry, John Rawls and Charles Larmore. These writers argue that, by their nature, conceptions of the good – theocratic, secularist, vegan, carnivorous, lesbian, polygamous, socialist, libertarian or whatever – give us insufficient reason to conclude that any one of them is better ...”

“... of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ against Soviet totalitarianism. One of the rare dissenters, Charles Burton Marshall, is quoted here as saying that this bizarre operation to ‘counter Communism’ by trying ‘to break down ... doctrinaire thought patterns’ and anti-American attitudes throughout the world was ‘just about as totalitarian as one can ...”