“... like Wilson and Blair – by not being about anything.The prominent British political theorist John Gray has also been seen as chameleonic. His passage from Mill to Hayek to Berlin (he has written books on each of them) has prompted charges of swaying with the wind or, still less charitably, being a Vicar of Bray. The Hayek phase coincided with ...”

“... their equivalent in the 2005 reissue of Our Island Story by the right-wing think-tank Civitas. John Clare, the education editor of the Daily Telegraph, appealed to his readers for donations to support this project. ‘They responded by sending in an astonishing £25,000.’ There were messages of endorsement from Lady Antonia Fraser and the feisty ...”

“... when available, sank in too slowly. Britain nodded in agreement when the European Coal and Steel Community was created (1950), the European Defence Community was debated (1954), and when the Treaty of Rome was signed (1957). But its policy-makers and public failed to register the impulse behind them. The EEC seemed a political means to an economic ...”

“... Stores dividend slips, the club cards, her spare hair nets, small gold safety pins, and a St John’s Ambulance First Aid book.’ Or maybe in the couple of old, badly-mended lustre jugs hanging above? ‘In each you would find something interesting: a small roll of bandage, a coin, a hair clip, a bus ticket or a stub of pencil with a rubber in its end ...”

“... heavily on such Western travellers to Mecca as Ludovico de Varthema, Domingo Badia y Leblich, John Lewis Burckhardt and Richard Burton. While most Western reports pretended to be objective, in some cases this was a pretence only, and Peters would have been better advised to have treated Varthema’s 16th-century Itinerario as a novel about oriental ...”

“... in Who do you think you are?), humorous essays, television plays. His TV adaptation of the John Fowles short story, ‘The Enigma’, was extremely skilful. To the general public he is probably best-known by virtue of the BBC serialisation of The History Man. This caused something of a stir a few years back, partly due to the excellence of the book ...”

“... a wooden cupboard, about the size of a telephone box, lined with metal and insulated with steel wool – had been invented in 1940 by the eccentric Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich for the purpose of improving its users’ ‘orgastic potency’ and by extension their general, and above all mental, health. It became fashionable in the 1950s and ...”

“... turned to the question of the ‘development’ of the hitherto poor societies. As he says, and as John Sheahan elaborates in his essay in the other volume, the new development economics had from the beginning been critical of existing economics. It resisted what was then, and has once again become, the orthodox insistence on caution, on the need to limit ...”

“... meeting, politicians, officials and reporters were isolated from the city population by a high steel fence, three thousand Dutch police officers, an impenetrable diplomatic language and an Ancien Régime luxury. Slipping through the fence for a long-standing appointment downtown, I felt reckless, light-hearted and plebeian. Reality, incarnate in a city ...”

“... imagination Carter may perform, she always comes to rest in the right ideological position,’ John Bayley wrote in a notoriously slighting 1992 review: the ballet idea works well, but otherwise he’s a bit tin-eared. A ‘moral pornographer’, Carter called herself sometimes; she could also have called herself an ideological choreographer. It’s not ...”

“... and ‘broadcast power around the entire planet’. In the spring of 1899 he secured $100,000 from John Jacob Astor IV (later the richest man to drown on the Titanic) for the development of a new lighting system. Disregarding Astor’s expressed intentions, Tesla spent it on moving his entire wireless-power operation to the mountain resort of Colorado ...”

“... or dour corporate axeman about him. This wasn’t Ian MacGregor flying in to Thatcherise British Steel or tell the miners they weren’t working hard enough. He was a natural diplomat, consulting across the board before making his moves, always referring to Nissan as an equal partner, fluent in four languages, with a gift for the expansive gesture – along ...”

“... says, ‘whether we had a right – any more than the French before us – to pursue by fire and steel in Indochina the objectives our leaders had chosen was a question that never occurred to me.’ His parents were professionals, of Russian Jewish ancestry but born in the US, and devout Christian Scientists. He went to Harvard on a full fellowship from the ...”

“... Austrian family to seek his fortune in America but returned home to make it in the Austrian steel industry. He married Leopoldine Kalmus, the daughter of a wine merchant, but his father disapproved of the choice: ‘By blood she was half-Jewish and by faith a Roman Catholic, offending at a stroke his Protestant ethic and his anti-semitic ...”

“... In January last year a directive from John Denham, secretary of state in what was then the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, announced that research funding for universities was going to be rethought.* The new system should ‘continue to incentivise research excellence’ and reward ‘the quality of researchers’ contribution to public policy-making and to public engagement ...”