“... the aggressor whenever there was any prospect that Iran might win the war. We are now paying the price of containing Khomeini; and Iran’s ‘impossibilist’ demand that Saddam Hussein be destroyed is echoed in many American political speeches. In Britain, the Observer, which had famously denounced the ‘crookedness’ of Anthony Eden just as our men were ...”

“... by Goubert, and this is all the more unfortunate in view of the fact that some of the best, like Richard Evans’s prize-winning Death in Hamburg, are not concerned with Britain at all. The literature of cholera is now abundant. Nor has typhoid been completely neglected. On more topical themes there is little in Goubert that will be of help in relation to ...”

“... million people in Britain buying a new novel every week or two’, and points out that for the price currently charged by British publishers for new hardback fiction, a family could rent a video recorder for a month. This is true: but it’s hard to argue that the novel as a form has any inherent edge over film or television, say, when plot and ...”

“... ruled by what was usually the least abusive type of occupation regime, a military government. As Richard Cobb has told us, the governor, General von Falkenhausen, was happy enough in Brussels to return there in 1952 to marry his Belgian mistress. Falkenhausen’s assistant, General Reeder, who conducted day-to-day affairs, was a reasonably correct ...”

“... chosen range. Is it the fear of spreading too widely? Among living writers she does not mention Richard Altick, Raymond Williams or Anthony Smith. Nor does she speculate about newspapers and books, which co-existed easily or sometimes uneasily on W.H. Smith bookstalls, although she has a brief and useful section on periodicals which steadfastly dealt in ...”

“... at Nasa had claimed the programme would have a success rate of 99.999 per cent. Petroski cites Richard Feynman, who, observing that this implied the space agency ‘could put up a shuttle each day for three hundred years expecting to lose only one’, asked: ‘What is the cause of management’s fantastic faith in the machinery?’ It wasn’t shared by ...”

“... sight, or play; of praised sufficiency at school. It is of mangling and clear-starching, of the price of coals, or of potatoes. It takes money to provide the exuberant childhood that Wordsworth celebrates in his ‘Immortality Ode’: glorious in the might Of untamed pleasures That factory boys and young mill-hands should be denied this was bad ...”

“... justice of the peace, or the mayor of this city? By what authority do you ask me these things?’ Richard (‘Beau’) Nash was at a loss for a ready reply. The ‘King of Bath’, as he liked to be known, was the gamester son of a Swansea bottlemaker, a heavyweight playboy whose abundant assurance, or chutzpah, had qualified him to act as arbiter of elegance ...”

“... with clear maps, an increasing rarity in these cost-conscious days, and its remarkably low price makes it almost a loss leader to entice one to buy the subsequent volumes. Yet one is forced to ask whether another book of this kind supplies any great need. Mr Pitt has little to say which is new or which demands the revision of previous judgments on the ...”

“... to Darling. In 1972 Vogue ran a full-page portrait of Darling, Curtis and Holly Woodlawn by Richard Avedon. Darling held a heart-shaped lollipop emblazoned with the words LOVE ME. The high point of her career came when she was cast in Tennessee Williams’s Small Craft Warnings. Williams thought Darling was ‘marvellous to work with … a disciplined ...”

“... Parliamentary footwork had ensured that the Bill progressed through its committee stage, but at a price: it would not apply in Scotland (largely because of the opposition of the Secretary of State, Willie Ross), Northern Ireland or the Armed Forces; and the age of consent was fixed at 21. Richard Crossman, who was then ...”

“... wax harvested from sperm whales were of much better quality but cost twice as much. In the 1850s, Price’s Patent Candle Company (PPCC) found a way to make palm oil candles that were white and didn’t smell, even when the raw oil was rancid. The candles were named Belmont Sperm – a link to the expensive spermaceti candles, though palm oil was even cheaper ...”

“... city – had been razed and looted by the British because its chief, Nana Olomu, objected to the price they had offered for his palm oil. Nana was forced into exile, just as King Jaja of Opobo had been in the 1880s. Jaja, a former slave, had developed a network of palm oil trading houses along the River Niger but in a fit of overconfidence he had attempted ...”

“... and global in its reach, gathering the wants of myriad individuals into its system of price signals in a perpetual plebiscite of desires’ – dispensed with these settings and constraints. It also dismantled the ‘troubling collective presence and demands’ of social democracy, turning unions, workers and the unemployed ‘into an array of ...”

“... of Languedoc, where, in the empirical detail of parish registers, cadastral surveys, tax rolls and price series, he perceived ‘the immense respiration of a social structure’ over the course of three centuries. In the 15th century, after the Black Death, the region’s population was at a historic low. Land was left fallow, and villagers complained about ...”