“... some of the cultural differences between the two labs. (This story is meticulously told in William Broad’s Teller’s War: The Top-Secret Story Behind the Star Wars Deception, 1992.) When the X-ray laser was ditched, Teller scarcely missed a beat, drumming up enthusiasm for the space-based anti-missile system known as ‘Brilliant Pebbles’ – the ...”

“... argued the apologist George Fitzhugh, would be better off if we enslaved them all, for then their masters would have some incentive to clothe them, feed them and see them through hard times. Abraham Lincoln came up with a famous rejoinder when he insisted that working for wages was only a temporary condition. Among us, he said, nobody with talent languishes ...”

“... Miller found quite unacceptable. And with a final glance back to the earliest of the sage’s masters, Chesterton, Miller declared that McLuhan ‘has accomplished the greatest paradox of all, creating the possibility of truth by shocking us all with a gigantic system of lies’. Miller’s book has the virtue of making his objections clear, but ...”

“... and so forth would fit his description very well. Although Meissonier’s first models were Dutch masters (Terborch and Metsu), the ‘indefinable hardness’ which Henry James, writing in 1872, identified does not come from them. Verisimilitude, James says, has become an end in itself: Meissonier understands to a buttonhole the uniform of the Grand Army. He ...”

“... of Spion Kop. The most dangerous wars are successful ones. Victorious generals and their political masters prefer to delude themselves by taking the credit for winning, and so construct fictional accounts of the war, imputing rational calculation where none could have existed. Such is the hair’s breadth between disaster and triumph that spite, recrimination ...”

“... master is a satire on this faith (as well as on the master’s unexamined belief that we are all masters of our actions). Diderot seems to have been provoked into writing Jacques le fataliste by his reading of Tristram Shandy. The opening of Jacques le fataliste is an imitation of a passage from Sterne’s novel, where Corporal Trim, Uncle Toby’s ...”

“... and foreigners, and complete equality between the sexes; slaves have the same freedom as their masters, and even domestic animals acquire the same sort of rights as their owners. If this sounds familiar, we can perhaps begin to understand what it is about late modernity that strikes some people as apocalyptic. Eliot, as he acknowledged in a radio interview ...”

“... at Weir’s, Arthur MacManus of the SLP, the needle-pointer from Singer; at the Albion Works, William Gallacher of the BSP; at Beardmore’s, David Kirkwood, who had recently joined the ILP and was a reluctant supporter of the war (‘I was too proud of the battles of the past to stand aside and see Scotland conquered’); and at Barr and Stroud, John ...”

“... pith.’ Or it might be a locker room, where ‘hair pieces like Skye terriers waited for their masters’; or a courtroom, where a lawyer called Cannibal Pinsker has ‘a large yellow cravat that lay on his shirt like a cheese omelette’; or an old man’s trouser fly, three feet long. As a writer, Bellow sees. He sees the bare toes of Pierre Thaxter ...”

“... of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters – Dickens and Balzac even – were flagrantly guilty.’ Pinfold is by admission a self-portrait, so Waugh must have expected readers to speculate on how this observation applied to his own career, and whether he was a one or a two-book man himself. In ...”

“... and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and ...”

“... Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and genuine nervous tension never fails.Ernest William Hornung, always known as Willie, was born in Middlesbrough in 1866, the youngest of eight children of a coal merchant from Transylvania, Johan Petrus Hornung, who anglicised his name to John Peter. Willie was sent off to be thoroughly Englished at ...”

“... to fall within Article 2. The killing has given rise to the current inquiry by the retired judge William Gage, whose report is likely to deal in detail with multiple allegations of abuse of detainees by British forces in Iraq. When the ECHR came into force in the 1950s, it was exactly such abuses of detainees in foreign countries that dogged the ...”

“... jet airliners, worried about what the Russians were up to, and comforted by the Giles cartoon, the William Hickey column and The Adventures of Rupert Bear. As with most newspapers, the torrent these days has become a trickle – a trickle supervised in the Express’s case by an owner, Richard Desmond, who made a lot of his money from masturbatory aids such as ...”

“... Jacobean tragedy, but there were enough of them and of attempted assassinations – the murders of William the Silent and Henri III and Henri IV of France; the attempt to poison Queen Elizabeth; the numerous plots, in both his kingdoms, on the life of James VI and I – for threats and rumours of regicide to place nations on recurrent high alert. In life and ...”