“... Neo-Impressionists aren’t obvious angels of chaos, yet Georges Seurat, Camille Pissarro, Paul Signac and Maximilien Luce all advocated anarchist positions, including ‘the propaganda of the deed’, aka bomb-throwing. This is one of the riddles of modernist art, and at its centre is the sphinx Félix Fénéon (1861-1944), great champion of Seurat ...”

“... in the vast Sutherland empire, it never had the funds to embark on any major change. The reason lay in the economic effects of family structure. Though the Cromartie family did not have to carry the burden of large families to be set up in the world, they had just as expensive a load in a remarkably large number of relatively youthful dowagers who lived ...”

“... beaten up in his cell by the Duncairn bobbies for leading a strikers’ demonstration: he lay with a strange mist boiling, blinding his eyes, not Ewan Tavendale at all any more but lost and be-bloodied in a hundred broken and tortured bodies all over the world, in Scotland, in England, in the torture-dens of the Nazis in Germany, in the torment-pits ...”

“... those of the day-before-yesterday’s uppers. Millionaires of the year 1900 didn’t go jogging or lay off the potatoes. They gorged themselves stupid on 12-course banquets, and showed off about it too. In similar fashion, Fussell himself points out that the splendidly dogmatic pseudo-scholarship with which prole sports-fans debate the finer points of the ...”

“... for my limited powers of apprehension and logical thought, my obtuse blindness to the answers that lay at hand. History shows that even the greatest scientists usually advance in small steps, because the development of new concepts causes them enormous difficulties. For example, in retrospect an experiment on the scattering of alpha-particles from a gold ...”

“... gold, any token that may have valuta if not intrinsic value. The numbers it’s necessary to lay waste to en route to these trinkets inflate according to the classification of the game, as do their character – poisonous spiders, hellhounds, Nazi zombies – and the graphic nature of their dispatch. Many games include as standard the ability to increase ...”

“... speech at once of a politician on the stump and a classicist on the podium. Powell’s brilliance lay in his rigour as a linguist, with a passion for accuracy that exceeded even that of his mentor, A.E. Housman. Powell’s Lexicon to Herodotus, published in 1938, had exemplified these qualities. It was hailed at the time for ‘amazing industry, much thought ...”

“... Persia east of Kirkuk and running down to Abadan on the Persian Gulf. All of the Arabian Peninsula lay within the territory, apart from Kuwait, then a British protectorate. That red line decided all the oil riches, and the oil wars, to come. In Mr Five Per Cent, Conlin sets out this history in sometimes dizzying detail; against it, the strains and oddities of ...”

“... even if for Kierkegaard it is the most important truth in the world. The cross of Christ, St Paul declares, is folly and scandal to both rationalistic Greeks and pious Jews. That nothing will flourish unless we remain faithful to the abject failure of Calvary is not what the world wants to hear. The Abraham of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling ...”

“... working as a dipintore, according to a document recording his admission to one of the city’s lay confraternities. Around 1420, he entered the Dominican Order, soon after taking the name Giovanni, and completed his year-long novitiate at the convent of San Domenico in Cortona, Arezzo. Once he became a friar, Angelico’s career as a painter took off: he ...”

“... his fiction, charging at his narratives, as he put it, like a horseman at a fence unaware of what lay on the other side. Nevertheless, there remains almost a complete set of advance plans for a late novel, The way we live now, which suggests that in his later career, like his fellows, he too was a note-making novelist. Although he conforms to pattern in ...”

“... his wife took up a job in a military school. He later resurfaced – or so Bowers believes – as Paul G. Schmidt, who over the past couple of years has submitted stolen short stories to over a hundred different periodicals, including quite famous stories such as Ethan Canin’s ‘Emperor of the Air’, which Schmidt sent under his own name to the ...”

“... was launched by a group called the People’s Advocate, an anti-tax organisation operated by Paul Gann and Ted Costa, the alleged brains behind the 1978 Jarvis Amendment, a.k.a. Proposition 13 (the granddaddy of California referendums, bonanza for property owners – see over page), and the outgoing state Republican chairman, Shawn Steel. In accordance ...”

“... centuries it became widespread. Ancient Sanskrit texts discuss the rates lenders could charge and lay down rules about the pledging of oneself or one’s sons as security. In China, there is clear documentation of interest, at high rates, from at least the fourth century BCE. The first mention in Greece is from the fifth century; thereafter, Greek ...”

“... has wider implications: conformity signifies health, deviance sickness; to diagnose madness is to lay down the law, while to attempt to treat it is to reaffirm the unequivocally rational nature of the social order. If traditional histories of psychiatry are Whiggish, anti-psychiatry histories (particularly that of Michel Foucault) are often relentlessly ...”