“... desirability of strong, stable government by a virtuous, able and authentically British élite’. William Pitt was an especially important symbol of this new élite: his well-known private virtue (‘prettygirlibus indifferentissimus’) made him for many the model of what a public servant should be, even if for others he seemed entirely contemptuous of the ...”

“... and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster ...”

“... Pavilion, there is a monument in which large statues of J.J. Roberts, the first President, and William Tubman, head of state from 1944 to 1971, face one another beside an inscription listing the country’s Americo-Liberian leaders under the portentous heading: ‘These men have governed Liberia.’ The 19th-century colonising elite of American freed ...”

“... few historical figures introduced to bolster the movie’s plot – the future Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, Archbishop John Hughes and the showman P.T. Barnum – are either transported backwards in time or engage in alliances with gangs that defy the actual marginality of these gangs within the class and power structure of the mid-century city. As ...”

“... of Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation.’ This is unfair on the likes of William Whewell, the 19th-century British philosopher who gave the name ‘palaetiological sciences’ to disciplines that seek to give explanations, cause by cause, for the changes that occur in the natural and social worlds over time. Whewell thought these ...”

“... that is, identity. Is it conceivable that the Howard-Brough breakdown could lead to such broad reform? It may be expecting too much from Rudd’s new government; but what counts is the direction so clearly projected in Coercive Reconciliation, which it would be reasonable to hope Labor would keep open, or at least not obstruct. In both Australia and ...”

“... had been rare, aside from the primitive roots-of-the-Nazi-mind approach of pop historians such as William Shirer and T.L. Jarman, who were inclined to draw straight lines from Arminius of the Teutoburg Forest, to Luther, Hegel, Nietzsche and on to Hitler. Gay, along with other German émigré historians, such as George Mosse and Fritz Stern, helped change all ...”

“... are jokes scattered elsewhere about other 1790s works, including the ‘philosophical novels’ of William Godwin and his school. Nightmare Abbey’s isolated coastal setting draws on Godwin’s Mandeville (published in 1817, when Peacock probably read it with the Shelleys), a work caricatured in the novel as ‘Devilman, a novel’, all ‘Hatred – revenge ...”

“... work was required to keep the country stable. He had grown up in the shadow of his famous father, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was for forty years the bedrock of Elizabeth I’s government, and learned his complicated profession at his father’s side, as the elder Cecil struggled to maintain the Elizabethan regime. It is clear that father and son rarely ...”

“... to a Manichean world-view. Madness, he insists, was for 18th-century Englishmen an extremely broad sociocultural category. Separately or simultaneously, its manifestations could be seen as medical, moral, religious or even satanic. It belonged to the body or the brain, or to the mind or the soul. It extended and ramified in all manner of directions, and ...”

“... view’ would ‘significantly enhance’ the capacity of either side to wage war. Within these broad parameters, it appears that the guidelines were broadly adhered to for the duration of the war – i.e. until August 1988. According to Scott, they were from the start ‘consistently represented’ to be government policy. In a letter written in December ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A ...”

“... was ‘stupid looking’. Edmund Gosse said he was ‘as restless and questing as a spaniel’. To William Henley he was ‘more the spoiled child than it is possible to say’. Henry James loved his writing – and loved mincing around its shortcomings – but saw him as ‘an indispensable light’. To others he appeared like a wraith or a tramp or a bag of ...”

“... female nudity.His parents’ attitudes and values continued to vein his character. They were broad-minded in certain ways, and Ede inherited that flair, but he also shared some of the inhibitions he decried. As a friend and patron he ‘gave with the generosity of the Magi’, as Freeman puts it. He was a celebrated host to artists, writers and other ...”

“... argument against his taking up French.’ His handwriting ‘was, and remained, unschooled’, William Feaver writes in his new biography, and adds: ‘Having to learn to write with his right hand in a new language and a new script prompted him to feel that such discipline, being foreign to him, was not for him. This became his pattern of behaviour at ...”