“... republics tested the limits of central authority, and finding them infinitely elastic, used new powers or misused old ones to divert huge flows of central funds into local social programmes. The tables turned on Pavlov with dizzying speed: in his period in office the relationship between the centre and the regions, districts and cities flipped over. One ...”

“... There is a case for thinking that the crucial conversion was that of Edmund Burke’s father Richard, and that Burke grew up knowing that his father had publicly renounced as an ignoble superstition the Catholic religion which Edmund’s Nagle mother, and later his Nugent wife, continued to practise. O’Brien eloquently and convincingly argues that ...”

“... who could be ‘silly like us’.Meeting the 50-year-old Auden, his undergraduate contemporary Richard Crossman observed: ‘The more Wystan talked – and he talked very volubly – the more he revealed that he is now a comfortable unreflective pundit with extremely conventional, washy views.’ Crossman’s own left-wing convictions and streak of ...”

“... of ‘the narrow gauge of the wheels’. We are regularly and justly impressed by Holmes’s powers of observation and inference. But there is no contest between ourselves and the detective, just as there seems to be none recorded between Holmes’s prototype, Dr Joseph Bell, and his pupils in Edinburgh – or, indeed, between that ...”

“... concise manner of expression gives him a real claim to be considered a distinguished writer. Sir Richard Jebb (1842-1905) devoted the main effort of his life to the making of an edition of Sophocles with commentary. In certain technical respects he was surpassed by his German contemporaries, while to modern taste he seems to make Sophoclean tragedy too much ...”

“... an ideological fifth column in Britain that openly supported the American cause. In February 1776, Richard Price, the minister of a dissenting Presbyterian chapel at Newington Green, then a village outside London, published Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, which was in its fifth edition by March. Not only did Price align himself with the ...”

“... autumn I bought, at Deighton Bell in Trinity Street, a copy of George III and the Politicians by Richard Pares, a book I have still, my name written in it by a friend, as I disliked my handwriting then as I do now. It was a detailed, allusive book, demanding a more thorough knowledge of 18th-century politics than a schoolboy could be expected to have, but I ...”

“... Christ) and added, in his Journals, that it was ‘quite literally lunacy’ to try to become one. Richard Swinburne’s book demonstrates the dangers of speaking about God rationally, or of arming him pragmatically. Swinburne is a theist. He hardly mentions Jesus, who is little more than a topcoat to keep the believer morally warm. Swinburne, who teaches the ...”

“... only such acts in matters of state as are provided for in this constitution and he shall not have powers related to government’. In practice, this amounts to a far stricter constraint on political utterance than that imposed on other constitutional monarchies. Akihito faithfully avoided straying across this line. Instead, he communicated by a kind of ...”

“... such negativity had all but drained away. ‘A new generation of Dadaists has emerged today,’ Richard Hamilton wrote in 1961, ‘but son of Dada is accepted.’ With Jeff Koons, the current maestro of the readymade, whose work is the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney in New York (until 19 October), acceptance has become affirmation, even ...”

“... full of junk and old gadgetry floating through time, dead appliances that still hinted at their powers of improvement. I felt she was keeping them for a happier domestic life in the next world, or for the past to return in this one, shaking us out of our need for better radios.She called one day to ask me to stop sending nice pictures of my holidays to her ...”

“... an attempt to convince the Russians that all issues of policy between the two super-powers were interconnected. There was at the same time the exciting and eventually rewarding adventure of re-opening United States relations with the People’s Republic of China. There was the fidgety fence-mending to be done inside the Nato alliance with West ...”

“... their opponents in the propaganda war by a brilliant campaign of softening up the press. Richard Evans of the Times was quoted as saying of their Press Officer, Pat Edlin: ‘He was the best Press Officer I’ve ever come across. He made press men in Whitehall or the big companies look like beginners. He ought to give lessons in it.’ Shrewder and ...”

“... of an interrogation about the lost letters, had incriminated himself to the solicitor-general, Richard Rich. Urged by Rich to accept the new law, More had allegedly replied: ‘Your conscience will save you, and my conscience will save me.’ Rich had then, it seems, played the classic stool pigeon’s trick of disclaiming any authority to embark on the ...”

“... in Bohemia, importing an opera company from Vienna and building up a horn ensemble of legendary powers. Bohemian players became so skilful that they travelled to France, not to learn, but to play. German makers were known all over Europe for their skill and inventiveness. Indeed, it seems likely that the first crooked horns – instruments capable of ...”