“... for an ever-lengthening extension of the charter.The two sieges of Namur are also thought to mark a novelty of a different sort: throughout the desperate and bloody fighting, the government encouraged public interest in and support for the war. The sieges were a media circus. It was the birth of war tourism. As Macaulay points out, there were plenty of ...”

“... buildings (Chichester Cathedral) and even businesses that wanted to make a dignified modern mark – the Time-Life building in Bond Street, for example. As time went by the pieces became larger: too large for the resemblance to natural forms still to function well. But they are now inoffensive – the eye glides peacefully over their bony lumps and ...”

“... Art dealers like the Wertheimers joined this composite elite. Dealing was a profession that rose dramatically in prestige precisely because the old families were losing money and new ones sought to acquire ‘the furniture of the great’. Prices were soaring. In 1882, Ferdinand de Rothschild instructed another Samson Wertheimer – a Jew from Fürth ...”

“... including PE – can succeed in comprehensives (both Wilshaw and City’s original principal, Mark Emmerson, ran comprehensives in East London before becoming academy heads).Their supporters hope that the likes of Wilshaw have finally beaten back the tide of ‘progressive’ education methods that rose in the 1960s and ...”

“... come to Innsbruck as her daughter’s chaperone. Jelinek was already 22. This was the high-water mark in Austria’s radical postwar renaissance. Thomas Bernhard was the acknowledged leader of the dissident pack, with Peter Handke and the Forum Stadtpark group from Graz representing the next wave of an obligatory avant-garde. Jelinek was at the young end of ...”

“... more than all’, especially of a non-commodity, a ‘nothing’ like time. One’s mental hair rose at this treatment. After all, Mme de Maintenon didn’t mean time but herself, her thoughts, her actions. But then Derrida acknowledged this objection and asked us to go along with his interpretation. How could one not assent to so gentle a request by a ...”

“... he noticed a vocal score of a very recently published opera. As though drawn by a magnet, he rose and took the volume from the shelf, sat down at the piano, opened it, and began to play. It was the ‘Good Night’ scene from Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia ... Ten years after Lenny’s visit to our home West Side Story excited the musical ...”

“... Zadig. Ginzburg’s Bologna colleague Umberto Eco uses the story at the start of his Name of the Rose, where the monkish detective William of Baskerville, a follower of Roger Bacon and a medieval version of Sherlock Holmes, gives a complete description of a lost horse by reading its prints in the snow. For Ginzburg and for Eamon, the techniques of conjecture ...”

“... it deserves. Not much is known about the Russian Jews who fought on the Boer side, though several rose to significant rank; we find a Commandant Kaplan and a Commandant Isaac Herman, while two others, Josef Segal (‘Jackals’) and Wolf Jacobson (‘Wolf’), who acted as scouts, were legendary figures in their time; Segal became a special adviser and secret ...”

“... Here we meet not only the men whose millions came from steel, railways and beer, but those who rose on pills, cannon balls, guano, mustard, malted milk, chocolate, feathers, buttons, carpets, alpaca and funeral crêpe. Alan Bennett has told of a scholarly-looking gentleman who, after a visitor’s tour of Buscot Park, asked the lady on duty ‘Could you ...”

“... of the Eighties, suggest that the idea of economic management was always an illusion nearer the mark? And, whichever side is right, what would be the implications for the future – especially for the future role of government? These are grand questions which are as much political as economic. They are seldom seriously debated: instead we have sterile and ...”

“... Miller still had their quota of rouged youths. But at long last the IQ level of the Footlights rose into triple figures. Successively onto the scene came such butch illuminati as Miller, Michael Frayn and Peter Cook, with results that Mr Hewison obviously finds it much less uncomfortable to write about, even if it simultaneously becomes more difficult to ...”

“... ask himself with a sudden suspicion of his intellectual cogency, “this unkind melancholy?” ’ Mark Rutherford (in The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane), the Professor in Chekhov’s ‘A Trivial Story’, Antonio in Scene One of The Merchant of Venice (where it is Antonio’s friends who attempt to persuade him that his melancholy is justified by his ...”

“... quite beautiful in his understated make-up, tan shirt and jeans. Shocked magenta hair was the only mark of his caste that James could identify. But both the women wore expensive gear. Black Dracula jackets and toreador pants with black puttees or black Benjamin Franklin smalls with sheer black hose and black cloth ballerina shoes made in the Republic of ...”

“... of unions or management, or ideally of both. The Second World War represented a high-water mark of corporatism, with industrialists and union leaders firmly established at the apex of power. Here, then, were the people best-informed about the audit of war. Here was an unparalleled opportunity for the productive classes to assert the primacy of industry ...”