“... similar to Mahler’s’, La Grange writes – and that Felix Weingartner would undergo after him. Richard Strauss, Böhm, Karajan and Maazel were later victims. The Viennese love nothing better than to greet a new director as a saviour and then to peck him to pieces. (Seiji Ozawa is next in line for the booby-trapped throne.) Mahler’s Jewishness was used ...”

“... could be dismissed as not especially consequential. In Volcanoes: Crucibles of Change (1997), Richard Fisher, Grant Heiken and Jeffrey Hulen devote only half a sentence to it: ‘The dust cloud … lasted less than two years, and its effects upon the environment, though harmful to people, were short-lived.’ But Wood, who intends no hyperbole in his ...”

“... in Kelly’s account, on the eve of the French Revolution with the Dilettanti’s circulation of Richard Payne Knight’s strikingly illustrated work, A Disquisition on the Worship of Priapus, in 1786. Kelly’s thoughtful if frustrating book is intended to save the Dilettanti from themselves. He seeks to show that they were more than the glamorous Hoorays ...”

“... by a fig-pecker. (‘If a figpecker could grow as big as a pheasant, it would be worth the price of an acre of land,’ Brillat-Savarin adjudged 19 centuries later, before divulging Canon Charcot’s method of consumption: pull out the gizzard and swallow the bird whole. M.F.K. Fisher calls this recipe ‘brutishly refined’ but admits puzzlement as ...”

“... between the US and UK to share codebreaking methods. In his history of the Five Eyes system, Richard Kerbaj goes back to 1938, when an MI5 officer decided to tip off the US embassy in London about a minor German plot to steal secrets from an American colonel in New York. After the culprit was arrested, another MI5 officer, Guy Liddell, travelled to the ...”

“... apart in age and came from different worlds. Burke was born in Dublin in 1729, the second son of Richard, a Protestant lawyer of ‘fretful temper’, and Mary, daughter of a Catholic family from County Cork. Richard Burke was a harsh and unforgiving father, and rumours about cradle Catholicism dogged Edmund throughout his ...”

“... it just as forcefully. How could he consistently associate himself with Russophobes such as Richard Pipes, who want us to believe that Russians have authoritarianism stitched into their genetic code? Deep contextual insight is ostensibly what leads Cohen to dismiss foreign blueprints and game plans. Russia should develop ‘an indigenous economic ...”

“... age. Cost, in some countries, is a factor. The admission to a Test match in India is way above the price range of the average earner. Indeed the game itself is beyond the means of the masses. In Sri Lanka, the average wage is about 800 rupees per month, and a new bat would cost 1200. India solves the attendance problem at some grounds, notably Calcutta, which ...”

“... Man. Time and again, Highwood is presented as a figure of adamantine integrity who has paid a high price for his faith. When publishers take him to lunch and offer to sex up his image – to ‘put an end for ever to the idea people unfortunately have that you are boringly old-fashioned and over-serious’ – he recoils with indignation. ‘You are really ...”

“... seventh month’, and younger brother of Little Heat Moon) stresses his red identity at the price of suppressing – almost – his legal patronym, William Trogdon. This was (he tells us) the name of a distant grandfather ‘who was an immigrant Lancashireman living in North Carolina and was killed by the Tories for providing food to rebel ...”

“... any death of any princess, and if there was, then it is no concern of ours and, by the way, the price of oil is going up again. But, even in the Twenties, it was already a very different Arabia from that in which Doughty had travelled – as Doughty himself clearly understood. The third preface makes the point clear: ‘The great War of our times has ...”

“... out for their quintessentially Post-Modern character. One was the fall of a Tory junior minister, Richard Spring, exposed by your old friends at the News of the World for taking part in a three-in-a-bed sex session. This was a political ‘event’ supposedly ‘reported’ by newspapers and television. But the event itself occurred only in order to be ...”

“... his win-at-all-costs ethic and ruthless discipline and tactics on his pre-teen charges. Like Richard Nixon he referred to himself in the third person; like the legendary American football coach Vince Lombardi he constantly repeated: ‘Winning’s not the most important thing, it’s the only thing.’ Connor’s hypermasculinity and aggression masked an ...”

“... implications put to work, to make some significant historical point. For there is no doubt, a price has had to be paid for them. For long, the amateur historian in ourself has been meaning to study such things as the history of Christian-naming and swearing, a history in which no doubt the French Revolution played its part. It would be interesting to ...”

“... solving these problems, above all the Palestinian problem. The globalists, on the other hand, like Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and Alexander Haig, looked at the Middle East as just one arena in their global fight against the Soviet Union. For them Israel was not part of the problem, but part of the solution. The State Department, where George ...”