“... The main outlines of the story are already known to television viewers the world over: rags to riches with Lenya and Brecht in Weimar Berlin; escape from the holocaust; new rags to even greater riches in the America of Broadway and Hollywood. In Mr Sanders’s version, many details are capably filled in, and elements ...”

“... and the Rothschilds at Waddesdon and Halton were but the most spectacular of these nouveaux riches builders. Significantly, the last great English country-house architect, Edwin Lutyens, built much more for the new rich than for the old. Middleton Park in Oxfordshire in 1936 for the Earl of Jersey is a late exception; Castle Drogo, his masterpiece in ...”

“... queen’. As the visible embodiment of stultifying tradition, obscurantist snobbery, unearned riches, hereditary privilege, vested interests, paternalistic decency and patrician wetness, the crown and its court exemplify many of the attitudes which Mrs Thatcher most vehemently detests. And as the successful leader of the nation in arms (remember the ...”

“... bars by a factor of 400 just so that the remaining uncertainties can be made visible on the page. David Weintraub’s new book, How Old Is the Universe?, captures the spirit of this post-lonely-hearts era. Weintraub, an astronomer at Vanderbilt University, offers a patient tour of the new data-rich landscape. Where Overbye had focused on the outsized ...”

“... the outsider,’ and his book abounds in stories of the nasty things that could happen to nouveaux riches or ‘foreigners’ from other parts of England when they were in too much of a hurry to exploit their new estates. In one Staffordshire village a greedy farmer found that his neighbours had destroyed his grass by driving their hay-wains four abreast ...”

“... to Solomon, ‘for he had heard, that they had anointed him king in the room of his father,’ David: For Hiram was ever a lover of David. And Solomon sent to Hiram, saying: thou knowest how that David my father could not build an house unto the name of the Lord his God, for the wars ...”

“... recognised, which, at most times in his life, he has taken great care to repress. One reward of David Maraniss’s biography of Obama’s first 27 years is that it confirms a hunch about Obama’s self-invention.* His vagabond life with a bohemian intellectual mother, and the charismatic and reckless father who went back to Africa, belong to an early ...”

“... the psalms in more flamboyant terms:How loudly I cried out to you, my God, as I read the psalms of David, songs full of faith, outbursts of devotion with no room in them for the breath of pride! … How loudly I began to cry out to you in those psalms, how I was inflamed by them with love for you and fired to recite them to the whole world, were I able, as a ...”

“... be extracted only with the deploying of more sophisticated methods. A sample of the new layer of riches that we can expect to be yielded up to us as a result is provided by these two volumes. The Tradescants, father and son, have long been renowned as the founding fathers of the museum profession in Britain, but that they were also the founding fathers of ...”

“... people – the visual embodiment of their sense of urban community, the physical witness to its riches and renown, and the symbolic expression of pride in its past, confidence in its present, and faith in its future. Ever since Asa Briggs’s celebrated essay on the building of Leeds town hall in his Victorian Cities (1963), the need for a detailed study of ...”

“... In a characteristically versatile display of cultural, technological and economic history, David Landes looks at the evolution of the clock as a machine, and at the triumph of public time as a discipline. And in an exceptionally wide-ranging foray into intellectual history, Stephen Kern explores the ways in which private notions of time (and ...”

“... clear as it might at first seem.This, historically, is a unique state of affairs. Until now, most riches have been based on real assets of land or trade – often inherited rather than created ex novo, but no less real for that. This new form of riches is based on gambling. What does it mean about us that we reward so ...”

“... influence on the generations that followed. Following Osborne’s death in 1994, however, David Hare, among others, leaped to the playwright’s defence, in his memorial eulogy and a longer lecture first delivered in 2002 and repeated on the stage of the Royal Court on the 50th anniversary of Look Back in Anger’s opening. Now John Heilpern has taken ...”

“... undermine enthusiasm for any political or social virtues the Revolution might possess. The result, David Bindman writes in his excellent catalogue of the exhibition, was ‘to establish in British consciousness, in place of the myriad complexities of the real French Revolution, a series of simple pictures and stereotypes which have proved virtually ...”

“... AD’, but that, in its very essence, time was now ‘man-made’ and ‘man-co-ordinated’. From David Landes’s work we know that in exactly the same year in which the Thirteen Colonies declared their Independence, London’s Gentlemen’s Magazine included this brief obituary for John Harrison: ‘He was the most ingenious mechanic, and received the ...”