“... shift occurred and America emerged as the dominant world influence on the English language. Robert Burchfield, chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, recently pointed out in the opening segment of the engaging BBC/PBS series The Story of English, that the centre of gravity of American English has itself shifted in the last generation from the ...”

“... missionaries, to which Parliament responded in 1868 by authorising a punitive expedition. General Robert Napier raised 13,000 troops, 20,000 logistic personnel, many thousands of mules and camels and 44 elephants in India, and shipped them to the Red Sea. After marching 780 miles overland to Tewodros’s capital, he defeated the imperial army (with the loss ...”

“... Second World War, Leo Steinberg wrote with equal insight on 20th-century innovators like Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and Old Masters like Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Velázquez. Yet this traffic is busier than ever before, according to Nagel, with art historians such as Hans Belting, Horst Bredekamp and Georges Didi-Huberman at work on ...”

“... stoppage’, congestion, stomach cramps and ‘irritated nerves’. Of the 1275 days between 14 May 1875 and the end of November 1878, Bismarck spent 772 either on his estates or at spas. Yet the real cost of his rule, Steinberg suggests, was borne by German political culture itself. Bismarck bullied his colleagues and subordinates (indeed, he found the two ...”

“... described by Sargent in his letter to James as ‘the unique extra-human’. That would be Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fézensac. This scion of the nobility (he was descended from d’Artagnan) is familiar to many of us who might not know his name, because he was the inspiration for more major fictional characters than any one person could ever aspire to ...”

“... meeting, known as ‘speaker’ and ‘participation’. In one you must listen, in the other you may talk. The form of discourse in participation groups is distinctive. Dialogue (in AA-speak, ‘cross-talk’) is proscribed. You don’t address your fellow alcoholics, you ‘share’. It looks to the outsider like a seminar discussion but isn’t; it’s a ...”

“... Davies, through the Enlightenment administrators, to liberal Tories, or Gladstone and Asquith. It may be unfair to suggest that Johnson believes that the Irish always needed to be taught (though this is how the period of ‘Celtic disorder’ is portrayed), but he shows a certain sympathy for those who imposed real dominion ...”

“... tried to suppress the book and to buy up copies from bookshops. It’s almost a relief to turn to Robert Vansittart, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office until his vehement opposition to appeasement led Chamberlain to kick him upstairs to the House of Lords, who proposed a different enemy: Prussia and Prussianism. He told Lord Halifax that the war ...”

“... this argument in his celebrated manifesto ‘Which Way to Inner Space?’, which appeared in the May 1962 issue of New Worlds, and over the next few years in various other essays and reviews, the best of which are brought together in Mark Blacklock’s new edition of the journalism. Ballard’s view was that science fiction should get over its ...”

“... have shown that, at least when assessing the potential toxicity of new drugs in humans, rats may be worse than useless. One analysis found that ‘results from tests on animals (specifically rat, mouse and rabbit models) are highly inconsistent predictors of toxic responses … little better than what would result merely by chance – or tossing a ...”

“... shaman Harry Smith, is arcane, but the critical world has been primed for its reappearance. Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good and Greil Marcus’s The Invisible Republic – recent accounts of the curious development of American folk music – both devote considerable space to the Smith collection, making impressive claims on its ...”

“... even liberal, white males (Jack Kemp). The logic was simple enough. Starting off with Robert Dole, the quintessential tough-guy white male candidate, the wounded veteran (= ‘war hero’ in current parlance), a man’s man of few words, the Convention would have been a total failure if it had unfolded as a celebration of manly virtues. That would ...”

“... makes them seem a lot smarter than they –’ Puzo’s companion interrupts, because she feels it may not be too smart to keep saying this. There is another reason, more intimately connected to these particular stories, why the last Don can’t be the last. Each Don wants to be the last, wants his descendants to merge, after his death, into American ...”

“... The person who elicited his strongest feelings was a young officer met during the war, called Robert MacGill (Hogg ‘loved him’, he said, ‘almost like an adopted son’). Hogg’s conduct was wild, irascible and volatile, both verbally and physically (he got into a number of fist fights at Oxford). He also had what another brother, Neil, described as ...”

“... Rose [Lee] virus’. Although Davis strings us along for a page, this bit is from a 1952 Robert Heinlein novella. One hundred million house mice did indeed overrun the Southern Californian town of Taft in 1926, and the picture of ‘Federal men killing mice’ with what look like scythes is a documentary photograph not a science fiction film ...”