“... other people’s style or mannerisms’. Jargon schmargon. This wealth of psychological insight, freely accessible to the author, more than compensates for any parsimony in the archival evidence available to him. For example, in 1945 Sir John Colville recorded in his diary, since published and now firmly in the public ...”

“... terms of art such as Derrida’s ‘trace’ and Foucault’s ‘archaeology’, though they deal freely with others which, in much the same way, give to familiar words new and more esoteric senses – for instance, ‘discourse’, ‘structure’, ‘narrative’. The editorial claim is that these transformations or extensions of the familiar senses of the ...”

“... of Lysenko’s fraudulent claims demonstrated that science could flourish only if pursued freely and without ideological constraints.Wolfe has interviewed the surviving actors and dug deep in the archives to trace the turf wars between the US State Department, the CIA and a variety of military intelligence-gathering agencies that had sprung up during ...”

“... world, peering timidly into the window of Peppe Ramundo Menswear and Black Tie. The statue of St John on the stone bridge was the one that all the tourists touched; there was a superstition that it meant you would return to Prague someday. The part of the statue that was touched had become brighter, not like the dull dark rest of the bridge; it was the ...”

“... had no interest in direct political action against the bombers and racists of Birmingham, Alabama, John Rice made a passionate speech to the campus in 1970 to commemorate the students killed at Kent State, calling them ‘young people who gave their lives for the cause of freedom and for the cause of eliminating useless war’. He went on: ‘As I look out at ...”

“... the dog, and an empty spud bag to take up the shite’ remind us that we are not in the world of John Banville. The odd reference to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the fact that there are immigrants around and a young woman, saying, ‘I was just like Oh my God,’ alert the reader with a mild shock that the novel is set in 2006, not 1906. As frequently in ...”

“... The only public figure to denounce capitalism in the past 25 years, Hobsbawm claims, was Pope John Paul II. All the same, another couple of decades later, the fainthearted witnessed a system so exultant and impregnable that it only just managed to keep the cash machines open on the high streets. Eric Hobsbawm, who was born in the year of the Bolshevik ...”

“... of us outgrow too well; the madness of adolescence, ‘just a face we are going through’, as John Lennon once said; the madness of love, where the only sanity would be a proper respect for our folly and an attempt not to do harm; autism; schizophrenia; depression; and our failure to find any sanity in our hunger for money (‘money gives people an ...”

“... housewife has for long been regarded by her, even if not by the law, as a family resource. It was John Hajnal in the 1960s who first alerted historians to the features of the marriage system prevailing for many centuries in Northern and Western Europe: late marriage and a sizeable proportion of permanent celibacy. The phrase ‘the Hajnal marriage ...”

“... its contributors Zukofsky, Carl Rakosi (another Wisconsiner), Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, John Wheelwright, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert McAlmon, George Oppen, William Carlos Williams and Whittaker Chambers, a friend of Zukofsky’s from Columbia who, among other things, later translated Bambi from the German. Quite a diverse lot, although most of them ...”

“... and surveyed Icelandic sulphur reserves. He had published some twenty books and could chatter freely in at least two dozen languages. No wonder this ‘nowhere’ seemed to hold nothing for him. He was bored and in physical decline; his requests for a transfer or early retirement were denied. There was nothing for it, he realised, but to let in the ...”

“... United States who are wedded to less egalitarian premises. Confident of the obvious fairness of John Rawls’s ‘difference principle’, which states that inequalities are not to be abolished but arranged so that they are of the greatest benefit to the least advantaged, philosophers like Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge have sought to apply Rawls’s theory ...”

“... to convey his condemnation of Charles’s beheading. For the Royalists, Muhammad was Cromwell; John Milton and other Parliamentarians responded by equating Charles with the prophet. Those who idolised the king as a martyr had ‘stolen the pattern from Mecha’, Milton wrote. Muhammad had been an all-purpose heresiarch, but now he devolved in the European ...”

“... health’ when Johnson first came to Streatham after the Thrales found him ‘on his knees before John Delap, an Anglican clergyman and minor playwright, “beseeching God to continue him in the use of his understanding”’ in terms so ‘pathetic’ that Henry Thrale ‘involuntarily lifted up one hand to shut his mouth, from provocation at hearing a man ...”

“... a’ ghàraidh, is placed in an open wall at the edge of the bank, so that wind can pass through freely. The bottom peat, the caoran, which has a greasy texture and is darker in colour – it tends to crumble when dry but is the best fuel – is laid out in the lower bog. A couple of weeks of favourable weather will allow the peats to form a hard ...”