“... are best exemplified in the three essays that give the theory their full support: those of Richard Hare, John Harsanyi and James Mirrlees. The first two are the only reprinted articles in this collection, and represent two by now well-known and influential approaches to justifying the theory. Hare’s essay expounds the derivation of utilitarianism ...”

“... use of the rich Elgar archives at Broadheath and in the Worcester and Hereford Record Office. In weight and work, these books together dwarf all previous Elgariana. The twice-told tale unfolded here is by now very familiar in its outlines. For the first forty years of Elgar’s life, there was little to suggest that genius, greatness and Gerontius were to ...”

“... was taken in haste outside the local vodka factory, and it would not be wise to put too much weight on more careful ones made more recently. But these have been quite striking. The Alliance is consistently preferred by between a quarter and a third of all voters. Nearly two-thirds of those who voted Conservative last time, well over a third of those who ...”

“... account of female animals working out. Eberhard delineates a world, concealed from view by the weight of his academic burden, which is quite extraordinary. To advance his argument against the male focus in the history of evolutionary biology, he takes an alarmingly close look at animal genitalia. His case, briefly, is this. The sheer ‘morphological ...”

“... In any case, he wasn’t the lone source of nerve agents for long. Two other German chemists, Richard Kuhn and Konrad Henkel, were studying the way nerve agents functioned at the chemical level. As part of their research they synthesised the third compound in what is now called the G series of nerve agents. Soman was twice as powerful as ...”

“... a Soviet spy, and with her support, Kuczynski was recruited by Moscow and received a visit from Richard Sorge, a charismatic German described by Macintyre as ‘a strange mixture of bibliophile and brawler, pedantic scholar and hard-nosed functionary … a dissolute warrior-priest’.* The Hamburger home became a rendezvous, and domesticity a ...”

“... phrase, Pearse’s ‘vertigo of self-sacrifice’. He addresses the question of how much weight should be placed on the blood sacrifice idea partly by examining the military strategy of the rebellion. No plans have survived and some of the rebels’ actions seem bizarre. Why was Dublin Castle not taken as a priority? It was weakly defended and once ...”

“... character sketches, the Essays present not a clear set of values (although they do attach great weight to mercy and friendship) but a shifting pattern of dispositional preferences extended through space (more than a thousand pages) and time (more than two decades). Montaigne’s biggest dispositional preference is for surprise, and following the drifts of ...”

“... have known but one really dull Bohemian, and I have known a great many clever ones. You know Richard Wagner said that whenever he got dull he went to Prague. “There I renew my youth,” he wrote, “in that magical and volcanic soil of Bohemia.”’ She dramatised the South-West breakthrough in her 1915 novel, Song of the Lark, a book that shed light ...”

“... of all the goods traded in the world, some $3 trillion worth – but barely one per cent of its weight! – travels via air freight.’ This promethean fireball of iPads, Peruvian blooms, farmed salmon and Amazon Prime deliveries is what these ardent neoliberals view as powering the world’s growth: like it or not, we are all in the comet’s supply ...”

“... state’ has been extensively studied from a variety of angles, most recently in Richard Overy’s The Bombing War: Europe 1939-45, which includes an authoritative account of the evolution into doctrine of the belief that strategic bombing defined the purpose of the modern air force as an instrument capable of transforming warfare. Overy ...”

“... in New York you see the opposite: massive masonry used to encase an elaborate steel frame, giving weight to a ceremonial statement. A picture of the Pompidou Centre shows the huge cast-steel gerberettes that transfer forces from the horizontal spans via vertical rods to the foundations; an engraving of 1764 by Piranesi shows centring and stonework for Robert ...”

“... is not enough. Governments must restore house building to something like postwar levels. When Richard Crossman was housing minister in the 1960s, some 400,000 houses were built every year, most of them council houses. In the last few years the number has scarcely exceeded 150,000. This year it is unlikely to reach half that level, and little of it will be ...”

“... moment of this kind in early Shakespeare (which Bushnell touches on very briefly) is the scene in Richard II in which Queen Isabel overhears her gardeners, who are at work, presumably, in a privy garden of the sort developed at Hampton Court. The gardeners turn their labour into an allegory of the present ills of the commonwealth, in which every bough is ...”

“... Tibet bandwagon has become a sleek and efficient vehicle on which glitterati Buddhists such as Richard Gere, Harrison Ford and the noxious Steven Seagal hitch regular rides. The Chinese occupation of Tibet has become the highest-profile colonial issue in the global consciousness, and a considerable weight about the neck ...”