“... winding round the other, each in itself interesting to follow: the investigative routine, ‘Who took the child, and where, and how, and why, and for whose benefit?’ and the psychological question, ‘What sort of people are these, whose lives have interacted, whose failures meet in the crisis of this moment?’ The sort of people who surround Davy, and ...”

“... women tried to look down and away and sideways. Women were among the sights that flâneurs took in as they slid through the crowds on the streets, but to look boldly in return was to designate oneself a woman of ill repute. The gazes which whizzed about and knocked and glanced against each other in the streets of Paris were an imaginative nexus from ...”

“... then, impressed. In retrospect, it was only a matter of time before the Devil’s Arch Advocate took on Faith itself. The book he has produced is clever, subtle and well-written, in an economical summary style. This much I expected, but I also found it, despite the archness, curiously affecting, highly serious and strangely profound. You quickly ...”

“... is the spur stood on its head). But many prime ministers have fared less well: Chatham and Lord John Russell because there are few private papers; Gladstone and Salisbury because their careers were too long for any one writer to encompass comprehensively; Charles James Fox and Lloyd George because their passion to rule and their ruling passions are so hard ...”

“... status of the ‘head of the respondent’s family’ and no less than 8 per cent of the sample took this to refer to the respondent’s mother. Even so, says Halsey, ‘the data have been organised so that ... these variables are all labelled as characteristics of their non-existent father’! If subjective phenomena such as social-class identity are to be ...”

“... that English literature had already been taking up the swelling theme of empire – a new book by John McVeagh has much to say about this. ‘How can one write the history of the English-speaking peoples and their empires?’ – a large question on which Calder must have long deliberated before striking out his path. There has been discussion lately as to ...”

“... it must be said, from accepting the advice of businessmen and bankers. Depression and recovery took place against the background of a monotonous litany, familiar now to British ears, intoned by the world of big business: that wages and social security costs were too high, that the law should be changed to ‘de-bureaucratise’ the labour contract, that ...”

“... and only four months after US troops had arrived in the southern half of Korea. Few in the West took the trouble then to find out about the nature of the Korean revolution. Few were even honest enough to acknowledge that it existed. And almost no one in the West has conceded that this is what the Korean War of 1950-53 – a civil war delayed by outside ...”

“... That made me search your volume. You are my master and my author; You alone are he from whom I took The good style that has done me honour. It is fitting that Virgil should see himself clearly, and in the harsh light of eternity the facts, in descending order of importance, are as he presents them: that he was born under the false and lying gods, which ...”

“... but there is, as far as I know, no evidence for this. Of the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II Laqueur can only comment that ‘the extent of Bulgarian involvement cannot be proven in a court of law,’ as if only an excess of legal fastidiousness – rather than a complete lack of evidence – stands in the way of our believing this ...”

“... for the Great Renunciation by projecting his suppressed desire onto the subordinate female. Men took an exhibitionistic pride in the ‘vicarious display’ of the well-dressed women who accompanied them. Naturally the women needed men to manage this imagery. As Hollander puts it, during the 19th century men invented fictions of women for themselves as ...”

“... Block Mask author – Hammett wrote his last book, The Thin Man, the same year – and Chandler took his place. Since he wrote slowly and deliberately he barely made a living from his fiction. It was only six years later, with The Big Sleep, his first novel and the first appearance of Marlowe, that he and Cissy could afford to move to the house where they ...”

“... and Edward Steichen – and look! here’s Stieglitz himself, whose portrait Cartier-Bresson took in 1946, the lastyear of the great forerunner’s life. Stieglitz’s face has a weary look not unlike that of Robert Flaherty, father of the documentary film, another great forerunner whose portrait Cartier-Bresson ...”

“... and which came to them by various routes from Caravaggio, would not have suited her. The painter John Opie is reported to have found Vigée Le Brun’s pictures good in ‘the imitation of particular things, velvet, silk etc’ but he also remarked that they gave him ‘no high pleasure as works of art’. Hoppner, more brutally, found even her way with ...”

“... attention of apprentice programmers. And so with their help, I taught myself BASIC. I soon also took out – or had taken out on my behalf – a subscription to Micro User, a magazine vast swathes of which were entirely incomprehensible to me, but which every month included the code for a BASIC game. The monthly game, and other software, later came free ...”