“... Smith and Williams, in Massachusetts, sprang up to commemorate their donors. But for sheer iron-willed capriciousness and morbid narcissism, nothing comes close to Stanford – or rather, Leland Stanford Junior University, as it is still officially called. As the historian Richard White puts it in his lively account ...”

“... of a thousand years, the first of gold, the second of silver, the third of steel, and the last of iron alloy. Each age represents a decline on the previous one, and the same is true of Hesiod’s sequence, which goes from gold, to silver, to bronze, to iron save that there is an unnamed fourth age, interspersed between the ...”

“... means of expression for muzzled populations. The liberal left in the West ought to know what an iron mantle Islamic law is capable of becoming, for societies who are eager for change. It should not let itself be seduced by a remedy that is worse, perhaps, than the illness.In response, Foucault admitted that ‘the problem of Islam as a political force is ...”

“... called sublime. To enter into direct competition with a big waterfall, or the excavations of an iron ore mine, or a blast furnace seen by night, or (something I once saw) a whole factory hall stained by a dusting of blue pigment, is a challenge even large-scale land art can find it hard to meet. Kapoor’s polished steel sculptures are prodigies of ...”

“... the chairman corrected her. ‘ “Mr Harold” has.’ Here, in a nutshell, is the theme of Richard Davenport-Hines’s book. Its early chapters form a heroic chronicle of upward social mobility. We first encounter an earlier Daniel Macmillan as a mid 18th-century crofter, scratching a living from the desolate but sublime landscape of the Isle of ...”

“... on slave labour imported from Africa. In a chapter on the development of the Caribbean islands, Richard Sheridan underestimates the role of slave labour. ‘The New World plantation represented the capitalistic exploitation of land,’ he writes, ‘with a combination of African labour, European technology and management, Asiatic and American ...”

“... damp and dilapidated house in Italy with dodgy investments and asset sales, in Davy Chadwick; Richard Verey in Slide, after spells in the Foreign Service and on Wall Street, effectively on the run from himself, finally forced back to what he knows best of all after running out of world: ‘I might not be here, in this ridiculous landscape, hurrying down ...”

“... eventually, rebellion. The dungeon in which North Koreans languish is more impenetrable than the Iron Curtain ever was, and Choco Pies alone will never have the allure of Levis and Audis. But seeds have germinated at Kaesong which could not have been sown in any other way. Far from the surrender to extortion which their enemies made them out to be, the ...”

“... on the bronze plaque on the stern, but only by tilting your head can you make out the faded ‘RICHARD’ below.I now know a good deal about the Bonhomme Richard. I know that it was originally a French merchant vessel called the Duc de Duras; that it was loaned to the fledgling US navy; and that it took part in the War ...”

“... is all plastic surgery and cholesterol-free restaurants, the North Country is veterinarians and iron skillets. Over a hundred years ago, the North Country was the last stepping stone to the fulfilment of America’s manifest destiny. Vietnam turned the Great American Dream of the 19th century into the Great American Scheme, leaving Montana and Idaho to be ...”

“... even now by memories from school. Till I read N.A.M. Rodger’s book I could not have placed Richard Grenville and the Revenge within twenty years, nor had any idea what he was doing ‘at Flores in the Azores’; nor do I know even yet (for Rodger is certainly not going to mention it) who wrote the poem about him, but I can remember whole stanzas of ...”

“... Six hundred years ago this summer, Richard II lost his throne. Preoccupied by the attempt to shore up his failing Irish peace settlement, Richard unwisely delayed his return to the mainland in order to confront a rumoured uprising, and landed to find his kingdom already slipping from his grasp ...”

“... the virtual extinction of original English music for more than a hundred years’. Richard Luckett will have no truck with cultural snobbery of this sort, even if he fastidiously forgets ‘Hallelujah’ when he writes that in ‘For now is Christ risen’ Christ is ‘named for the first time in Messiah’. His quirky, learned, acerbic book ...”

“... in Paris, but it is still the most impressive and among the most magisterially consistent. Richard Goy and Robert Berger, in their respective accounts of the construction of the Cà d’Oro and of Louis XIV’s Louvre, remove ambiguities which hang around the word ‘built’. They ask who made decisions, who paid, and how much, and why each building ...”

“... claim was by lineal descent from Edward III, and was a strong one if you ignored the deposition of Richard II in 1399. In the mid-1450s, Richard, Duke of York, Edward’s father and England’s pushiest peer, had twice attempted to sideline Henry VI, who suffered from lengthy spells of mental illness and was repelled by the ...”