“... to evoke three generations of the Beech family – a dynasty which spans the 20th century. Robert, a First World War hero in his youth, became a successful armaments manufacturer, dominating the family and the family business until he was killed in 1972 by a terrorist car-bomb just outside his house. Harry, his son, refused to take over the Beech ...”

“... attached to it. Adams and Frantz describe in detail one deal in which Clifford and his partner Robert Altman, well-known in Washington social circles since he was married to Wonderwoman, bought and sold shares through BCCI and ended up with $9.8m in their pockets. Kerry reveals that Clifford’s and Altman’s firm was paid some $45m in legal fees by ...”

“... volumes of the prosecution’s documentary evidence, the unpublished papers of the US prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson, and of the principal US judge, Francis Biddle, and numerous published memoirs. Both have consulted unpublished collections of papers in the US and Britain, although in some cases not the same ones; and both regale us with titbits from ...”

“... Bagehot undoubtedly was, thoroughly, professionally and ancestrally: a banker. His grandfather Robert Bagehot was a West Country merchant who shipped goods up the River Parrett under the name of the Somerset Trading Company. Robert’s younger son, Thomas, married the niece of Samuel Stuckey, the founder of Stuckey’s ...”

“... commonly posed or faked, to its over-simplistic headlines and its unintentional absurdities. Robert Kee’s The World We Left Behind shows that one can make up an interesting and agreeable book almost solely from this source. It isn’t ‘social history’, since, as it moves from 1 January 1939 to 31 December, it is largely concerned with ...”

“... letting the markets know it sooner rather than later?15 July 1997. To St Paul’s for the memorial service for Lord Chief Justice Peter Taylor. The first and best address is given by Humphrey Potts, a lifelong friend of Peter’s from their time together at the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle and now himself Hon. Mr Justice Potts of the Queen’s Bench ...”

“... by Mark Thornton Burnett’s edition of the plays for Everyman in 1999, and Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey’s for Penguin in 2003; the first Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe appeared last month (edited by Patrick Cheney).* Even without the bloodshed and intrigue that the fatal stab wound in Deptford supplies, the biographers’ Marlowe is ...”

“... programme and, in particular, the agenda of the great banks. Under the watchful supervision of Robert Rubin, who, having been CEO at Goldman Sachs, was made Clinton’s Treasury Secretary in 1993, the already disintegrating barriers between investment banks, commercial banks and insurance companies – originally erected by the New Deal, in response to the ...”

“... that was it. A stock vision of undergraduates then (gleaned from movies like A Yank at Oxford with Robert Taylor) was of a young man in dressing-gown and slippers, a towel round his neck en route for the distant baths. I didn’t run to a dressing-gown and slippers either: ‘Nobody’ll mind if you just wear your raincoat,’ my mother reassuringly said. I ...”

“... the company servicing the payments earns 30 per cent of the fee. Say you could set up an online service to pay these tickets, and then – and this was the enticingly pseudo-sensible part of the pitch – take into account that only, say, 20 per cent of the public will be willing to pay in this convenient new way. Lo, you have just created a business with ...”

“... their home. Johann Burckhardt, William Thomson (known as Osman effendi), John Gardner Wilkinson, Robert Hay and Edward Lane also ‘went native’ on their travels. Like Champollion, they aped the robes and turbans of the Ottoman ruling class, browned their skin, and made a show of living in ‘Oriental’ style. Hay, Burton and Gardner Wilkinson took their ...”

“... university from trade. Such university involvement as there was tended to be justified by public-service concerns: ensuring that exclusively licensed products were manufactured to proper standards, while generating income to support further fundamental academic research in an era when both government and corporate funds for these purposes were ...”

“... independent regional power bases, which the early modern tsars were trying to turn into a reliable service class. An elaborate ‘place’ system (mestnichestvo) determined a boyar’s exact rank for honorific and ceremonial purposes. Patron-client relationships were crucial in politics and every other aspect of life. Collective responsibility – on the part ...”

“... passionately committed to France, he was granted French citizenship only after two years of war service, and two years before his death at the age of 38 of Spanish influenza. If he struck many of those who met him, from Alfred Jarry to Max Jacob to Picasso to Robert Delaunay, as larger than life, as the avant-garde spirit ...”

“... by marriage. And before the emergence of mass democracy and a large and professional civil service, a great deal of political discussion and intrigue took place at country-house weekends and over polite dinner parties. One has only to glance, say, at Trollope’s Palliser novels to be reminded of that. Why, then, have those women who arranged the ...”