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“... ultimately on grounds that are independent of testimony and accessible to each individual’s powers of reason, memory and observation. For this objection to succeed, reason, memory and observation must themselves be cleansed of testimony. For as Coady points out, much of what passes for observation is already enriched by the testimony of other ...”

“... the ‘famous art’ – is magic. The play is part of the Renaissance debate about magic: its powers, its permissibility, its pitfalls. It poses the basic Elizabethan question about magic: liberation or damnation? There has been an upsurge of interest in Renaissance occultism recently, due partly to Jung’s interest in the psychodynamics of magic, and ...”

“... protégée was ‘so unshaped in some ways’, he wrote urging her to develop her ‘prostitute powers’: ‘This is the way, first to disillusionment, secondly to knowledge, thirdly to freedom from inferiorities and fourthly to anything that may be worthwhile.’ This, from a curly-headed minor who, to compound his cheek, ordered her to read the whole of ...”

“... in libidinous excess. The rhetorical forces of primitive Christianity confronted the demonic powers of Wall Street. In this rhetoric there was ‘a certain gravitas, an undercurrent of apocalyptic finality … foreign to our sense of things today’. Religious language raised the stakes in the struggle against concentrated capital. This was true for ...”

“... against your will or take away your liberty. Whether psychiatrists acknowledge or even want these powers, they come with the territory. It’s ironic, to say the least, that conditions whose biomedical basis is so uncertain should generate diagnoses that are so consequential. These statutory powers aren’t a recent ...”

“... revolution’ – though in Southern Europe too, to echo the words of the great German historian Thomas Nipperdey, ‘in the beginning was Napoleon.’Isabella shows that the 1820s uprisings originated in two distinct institutional contexts. First, there were the secret societies, which ‘found in the organisation and principles of European freemasonry a ...”

“... for much of the Russian population, is described with unsuppressed indignation. (One ‘Comrade Thomas’, a Comintern employee though not even a party member was allowed to disburse 1.22 million gold roubles in Germany in 1921, much of it unaccounted for, before a commission set up by Stalin relieved him of his responsibilities.) The archives yield more ...”

“... In September 1814, the European powers were meeting at Vienna to carve up the continent after the fall of Napoleon. The delegation from the Grand Duchy of Baden was hoping to consolidate the territorial gains it had made under the French empire and to prove itself worthy of a major role in the new Europe. Duchy officials were alarmed, therefore, when they heard that Baron Karl von Drais, a publicity-seeking eccentric who was employed by the Duchy as a forest master, intended to use the Congress as a showcase for his horseless carriage ...”

“... is coaxingly familiar. It didn’t matter to Keats that Chatterton’s spurious versifying priest, Thomas Rowley, was a fiction. What he admired was the result, a revivifying of English style with plum Anglo-Saxonisms. Motion needs us to believe in Dr Tabor’s historicity for the sake of the literary debate that is the novella’s point. But to make the ...”

“... careers. Though it presents itself as an American Civil War picaresque (the opening line is: ‘Thomas Jefferson Woodhull was 11 years old when he ran away from home to join the Union army’), it gradually turns into a sort of steampunk horror story, featuring the reanimation of corpses and characters with names like The Urfeist and Colonel Blood. Its ...”

“... the view of the self offered by literature was still fairly oblique. It was that moral desperado Thomas Carlyle who first put the question squarely, in Sartor Resartus: ‘Who am I; the thing that can say "I” . . . Whence? How? Whereto?’ Taken up by countless young clerks and artisans, Carlyle nevertheless had little faith in their ability to answer such ...”

“... the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], ...”

“... by a truck. Much has been written about Biden as ‘America’s mourner’, given preternatural powers of empathy by the loss of his wife, his daughter and then, in 2015, his son Beau, from brain cancer. ‘The sensation I had,’ Biden wrote, ‘was best captured in a line I knew from a sonnet by John Milton: “I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my ...”

“... outlined an international order in which every culture, including the cultures of the vanquished powers, would have something to contribute. But this Epcot Center vision of the post-1945 world was never a real possibility. In Mandler’s account Benedict and Mead were providing an alternative to the ‘democratic universalism’ of the early Cold ...”

“... by contrast, drew on the combined resources of armies whose loyalty to the traditional powers had never been seriously in question. To borrow the binary categories of Niall Ferguson, ‘towers’ prevailed over ‘squares’. Hierarchies beat networks. Power prevailed over ideas and arguments. The effort to make sense of this outcome gave rise to ...”