“... Latin. Toynbee was not as good at this as his father-in-law Gilbert Murray or his own contemporary Ronald Knox: but he was good enough to win a Balliol scholarship, which he followed up with First Classes in both Mods and Greats and a Balliol Fellowship in Ancient History. Saved by an opportune attack of dysentery from the holocaust of the First World War, he ...”

“... interpretation remains attractive – especially when one remembers that the calendar provided the frame for a remarkable set of frescoes of the late 1460s, which combined the modern and the mythological, the erudite and the courtly, in ways that look forward to Boccaccio: the decorations of the Salone dei Mesi in the Palazzo Schifanoia in ...”

“... history of racial extermination. To demonstrate its continuing role in US politics, Evans cites Ronald Reagan’s decision to begin his 1980 Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964. The American Century details J. Edgar Hoover’s personal and ...”

“... Afew days​ after Ronald Reagan died in 2004, I was hurrying through Newark airport when I spied his smiling countenance on the cover of the Economist, accompanied by a caption in big block letters: THE MAN WHO BEAT COMMUNISM. This preposterous tribute succinctly summarised the conventional wisdom regarding the end of the Cold War ...”

“... happens into a written constitution. Utopian or dystopian? It’s not simply that freezing the frame at an arbitrary point of time is a recipe for constitutional paralysis. It’s that, if change is in truth destined to go in the direction Bogdanor predicts, democracy will not necessarily be any richer or the way we are governed any better. Anybody with ...”

“... the workshop it was too big and didn’t fit. The mosaicists bodged it by taking chunks out of the frame and panel. One imagines there was a fine old row between client and contractor. Shoddy work becomes more common as the book goes on, as do other signs of what de la Bédoyère calls ‘death, disruption and decline’. Murder victims keep being unearthed: a ...”

“... for a $10 million backhander to the Contras and then lost the money in a Swiss computer error. Ronald Reagan sent three envoys with a cake and a Bible to Tehran to discuss an arms-for-hostages trade with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Robert MacNamara went to a briefing on Cuba believing that it was more than likely that he would not live through the weekend. The ...”

“... various critical ‘modes’. Three versions of pluralism are examined, belonging respectively to Ronald S. Crane, Kenneth Burke and M.H. Abrams. Professor Booth does his best, at terrific length, to reconcile these three different pluralisms with each other, but finally they don’t seem able to settle down together except within the even bigger and better ...”

“... being ‘under fire’. Among those gunned down was a severely mentally disabled man called Ronald Madison: police shot the unarmed African-American in the back, kicking him as he died. The police also killed 17-year-old James Brissette and wounded four of his companions as they crossed a bridge looking for food. They too were black and were not ...”

“... Republican doctrine and get the Federal Government out of local problems. After all, as Ronald Reagan never tired of repeating, ‘in the Sixties we fought a war against poverty, and poverty won.’ Did Washington’s intervention actually exacerbate the problems of the inner cities, as American conservatives have always claimed, or did it simply ...”

“... the play, on Sunday morning I went to communion in the college chapel and in the same self-serving frame of mind, though in those days I would go to communion every Sunday anyway and sometimes mid-week too. Asked in the interview what I was intending to do with my life I probably said I planned to take holy orders. This was true, though I’m glad none of the ...”

“... it is sufficient to have made a covenant; for Harrington, it is necessary for citizens actively to frame the laws themselves. The point on which Hobbes and Harrington agree is that no man enjoys immunity without being part of the sovereign body. This idea is still enshrined in the conventions regarding various forms of legal immunity, notably parliamentary ...”

“... for women who don’t cross-dress because they are full of good tips – ‘If you have a large frame, avoid frills and busy prints’, and so on (and off). The How-to Guide becomes the best form of social critique; these magazines reveal ‘the degree to which ALL women cross-dress as women when they produce themselves as artifacts’ (this echoes Gloria ...”

“... was at least abashed when his nakedness was pointed out: Dr Rowse seems shameless. ‘To/President Ronald Reagan’, his book begins, ‘for his professional appreciation/of/William Shakespeare’. (Was Reagan wise to garnish Rowse’s text? What if the Dark Lady becomes an election issue, with Emilia v. Ms Elgar, the Italian against the black ...”