“... Emperor Rudolph II, who sat in his high palace in Prague communing with the stars and tried to get John Dee to put him in touch with the heavenly orders. True, there had been Pope Paul III, a politician if ever there was one and founder of the Counter-Reformation: he retained an astrologer to tell him, I suppose, when it was prudent to launch the Society of ...”

“... had it that a plain-clothes policeman was always on hand to see who read it). It was a major municipal asset, but the apparatus of tickets, hard-faced, uniformly aproned assistants, application forms and punitive fines was a deterrent to the uncertainly literate. And the stock of popular fiction (anything lower than, say, Denis Wheatley or Ursula ...”

“... that poem is in some ways the centrepiece of Vendler’s book. The trouble is there’s more to John Ashbery than ‘The Painter’, ‘Drunken Americans’ and his other disquisitions on the Reflective Sublime. To compare Vendler’s choice with Ashbery’s, in the invaluable Selected Poems, is to find a troubling divergence. She gives us nothing, for ...”

“... vividly realised than in C.S. Peirce, first and foremost of the American Pragmatists. Peirce was a major philosopher and prodigiously many things besides, polymathic to a degree that should have been impossible in the later 19th ...”

“... routine paths, but discover that they are now pacing them out on the edges of cliffs. None of the major questions is settled: the economy is not securely a market one, the polity is not securely a democratic one, the constitution is not even yet in place and the rule of law is still arbitrary. More important, daily supplies have been desperately scarce and ...”

“... the biographising of Anthony Eden is one of some interest. He offered the task to the late Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, author of many major books including a study of the Munich crisis and the official biography of George VI, who agreed on condition that he would not be expected to publish in Lord Avon’s lifetime. By a ...”

“... Thai prime minister, by Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi. Now City are trying to buy their way to a major trophy and Tevez, an Argentinian striker, is part of the masterplan: he is paid £250,000 a week. (Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that, as David Conn has been jaw-droppingly reporting in the Guardian. Tevez’s ‘economic ...”

“... gigantic versions of amorously phallic flutes’ (we shall meet the flute-sized ones in the St John Passion). Via the Greeks our multi-cultural author arrives at what he calls ‘an event presumed to exist in historical time – the Crucifixion of Christ’. Why presumed? Did it happen or not? Perhaps the query is irrelevant in a historical context ...”

“... discipline. The unchallenged norm in pre-Skinnerian political thought was the study of a canon of major thinkers who engaged in analysis of a set of perennial concepts. Skinner’s reframing of the history of political thought was underpinned by the philosopher J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts. The central preoccupation of a historian of political ...”

“... imagines, could a post-Willinsky scholar do what Raymond Williams did in the Fifties and base a major intellectual enterprise on the confident assumption that OED represents ‘a systematic, reliable and comprehensive history of the English vocabulary’ – raw lexical material. In the Foreword of Keywords Williams writes: One day in the basement of the ...”

“... to ‘unpack’; then, and most important, he examines with a close and informed eye Truman’s major decisions as President. Through all this the reader remains effortlessly and pleasantly with the story. His judgment on Truman, assuming office after the greatest American and perhaps world figure of the century, is favourable but by no means uniformly ...”

“... Iraqi people,’ he said. There is something in that. The portraits which dominate crossroads and major buildings throughout the country are there in part to express his domination over the cultural and ethnic diversity of Iraq. In them, like a visitor to a theatrical costumier’s, he appears in the Bedouin k’fieh, the turban of a Kurd, the suit of an ...”

“... Garnet Wolseley and Oscar Wilde popular celebrities. Wolseley was so tickled by being portrayed as Major-General Stanley in The Pirates of Penzance that he learned the show-stopping ‘Modern Major-General’ patter-song and performed it at parties. Gilbert communicated no real sense of chaos or panic because the instability ...”

“... art treasures from all parts of Europe, acquiring works not only for himself but also for two major institutions in America – the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan in New York. He acted as their purchasing agent, and his diligent efforts helped both museums to build extraordinary collections of Greek and Roman art. Ned’s chief assistant ...”