“... A family on the throne,’ observed Walter Bagehot, in one of those honeyed phrases which may mean more or less than they seem to, ‘is an interesting idea.’ Indeed, it is. But during the past two hundred years of British royal history, it is an idea which has embodied itself in two very different human forms ...”

“... Vienna. Dolf was in Britain only temporarily, however, awaiting a visa for the United States. In May 1940, he sailed for New York. Joyce was devastated. Less than a month later, against all expectations, she went too. The American edition of Mrs Miniver had been selected as a Book of the Month Club Choice, and her publishers wanted her to promote it. Both ...”

“... Fields, he comments that the man on whom his character is based is a continent-hopping, devil-may-care Princeton graduate whose six languages include Khmer. ‘I graduated from Emerson College,’ Gray says, ‘and am still wrestling with American.’ What are actors, he wonders, compared to these dazzling ambassadors and foreign correspondents and ...”

“... has moved into the vanguard of theoretical physics. He is one of a handful of people whose work may form the foundation of a ‘theory of everything’, a description of nature so fundamental yet so all-encompassing that it would be able to account for all the phenomena of the natural world. Scientists who know Hawking and work with him tend to protest that ...”

“... who led the 1904 invasion of Tibet and would help finance and organise the Everest attempts, may have been ‘imperialist to the core’, but he was also one of the first to cultivate a mystical appreciation of Tibetan culture, inspiring him to found the World Congress of Faiths. Charles Howard-Bury, the leader of the 1921 expedition, lived a life ...”

“... princes are obliged to resort to in the face of desperate and difficult circumstances’; they may ‘exceed common law’ and ‘harm particular interests’ in order to promote ‘the public good’.* Naudé opposed religious fanaticism, yet he upheld as a model coup the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572, when Charles IX ordered the slaughter of ...”

“... Lindo), Eddie (Norm Lewis), Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr) and Otis (Clarke Peters). Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors) has belatedly joined them. They have been trekking through the jungle for a day or two and (with the exception of David) aren’t as young as they were. Tempers fray, the men pick on each other’s ...”

“... seat of government in the Piazza della Signoria, he stopped in front of Michelangelo’s 15-foot David. He didn’t see in it a symbol of the Florentine nation or even identify the figure. For the abbé, it was ‘a great phantasm of white marble, well worked and all of one piece’ (‘ung grand fantosme de marbre blanc, bien ouvre et tout dune ...”

“... My Baby and Parsons’s previous novel, the ‘publishing sensation’ Man and Boy. Man and Boy may have been ‘universally acclaimed’ but it was clearly not widely read, since reviewers of One for My Baby seem not to have noticed the many features the book shares with its predecessor. Both novels are set in North London. Man and Boy was divided into ...”

“... world and of human life that was greatly more radical and far more recent in European thought than may sometimes be appreciated’. What was gradually in the process of being formed was essentially our present-day outlook: new ways of seeing and representing which were derived from a great variety of influences, including closer and more accurate scientific ...”

“... said, ‘people are prosecuted for obstructing justice’ without an underlying crime – they may have obstructed ‘to avoid embarrassment’, for example, or ‘to avoid harm to their business’. He also found it odd that Mueller had merely laid out the evidence on both sides concerning obstruction: he was charged with making a decision and the whole ...”

“... David Womersley’s massive and elegant edition of Gibbon is the better timed because it comes a century after the edition scholars have been obliged to use as the nearest to a critical text. It was in 1896 that J.B. Bury brought out the first volume of his edition, which he reissued in 1909 and which until now has been considered standard ...”

“... idealists. What do these ancient arguments have to do with the world of Ruling Performance, with David Pannick’s reflections on the English judiciary, or with Vernon Bogdanor’s Encyclopedia of Political Institutions? For one thing, they cast light on the hopes and fears most of us entertain in the face of government activity of all sorts. Realists who ...”

“... came naturally to Boswell, less naturally but effectively in the sentences of Adam Smith and David Hume, but at the cost of the reservation of the Scottish tongue for casual, domestic or low-life use. Yet, as Daiches reminds us, with an exceptionally happy choice of quotations, the literary endeavours of the upper class were accompanied by a genuine ...”

“... of fascinating studies, ranging from Babylon to 20th-century Ghana, from China to Madagascar. David Cannadine, in his Introduction, says that the topics covered are mainly pre-modern and therefore outside the scope of most professional historians. In their Acknowledgments, however, the two editors refer to the ‘rites of passage’ of contemporary heads ...”