“... Rubinstein needs strong evidence to deny that Britain’s was ‘the first industrial economy’ (Peter Mathias) or that there was a ‘transformation of the British economy to an industry state’ (Phyllis Deane). The evidence he relies on comes from income-tax returns: ‘The totals for London and the Home Counties may be taken as convenient shorthand or ...”

“... part of 18th-century European culture – and as part of ‘high culture’, in ways outlined by Peter Burke and Robert Darnton. Science and technology can then be distinguished, and theoretical advances, in, say, the earth sciences, are not assumed always to have produced great practical breakthroughs. As one of the contributors, Steven Shapin, neatly turns ...”

“... lawyers to prevent the abuse of prisoners, but Akam reports that the divisional commander, General Peter Wall, refused to give this order to the forces under his command. He was later promoted to chief of the general staff.British behaviour in Basra inspired widespread hatred. Officers deceived themselves by talking of their good works, such as repainting ...”

“... of the rebuilt City churches than the three (St Benet Paul’s Wharf, St Edmund the King and St Martin within Ludgate) that are now fairly reliably ascribed to him, rather than to his many collaborations with Wren (notably including St Paul’s). But his enemy John Flamsteed reflected the general assessment when he aimed to insult Hooke as an impudent ...”

“... in Venice in 1546 contained autobiographical material. These documents suggest a personality which Peter Humfrey in his 1997 study of Lotto described as ‘introspective, hypersensitive, often prickly and quick to take offence; but also generous in his affections, tender in his humanity and possessing a quirky sense of humour’. They also make it clear that ...”

“... the daunting ambition and accomplishment of Burrow’s editing. Aided by the archival labours of Peter Beal, he has examined, and collated the variations among, an astonishing range of manuscripts in which copies of Jonson’s poems prove to survive, some of them in his own hand. The Oxford editors, unaware of the extent and esteem of the circulation of ...”

“... shadow chancellor, after an alleged leak of sensitive information had impugned the probity of both Peter Thorneycroft, the chancellor of the exchequer, and Oliver Poole, the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, ‘with his vast City interests’. Poole naturally insisted that his name be cleared, and the resulting Bank Rate Tribunal found that there was ...”

“... the exotic array of worst-case scenarios we are now faced with. In his book Our Final Century, Martin Rees puts the chances of the human race surviving the next hundred years at 50:50.* The list of things that could go horribly wrong ranges from the highly unlikely (a giant asteroid strike) to the frankly bizarre (rogue scientific experiments rolling the ...”

“... Hall). Although there have been some nuanced treatments of Basaglia’s work (for example, in Peter Sedgwick’s Psycho Politics), the perception of him in British psychiatry was predominantly formed by hostile assessments that emerged in the 1980s as part of the backlash against ‘antipsychiatry’, particularly ...”

“... reread before he died. (He supplemented this list with the Australians Henry Handel Richardson and Martin Boyd as well as the Hungarian Gyula Illyés; references in his work suggest that Hardy, Lawrence and Nabokov have also occupied his attention significantly. He seems to loathe Norman Mailer and Peter Carey.) There was a ...”

“... as the CIA’s private venture capital firm. One of Palantir’s founders, the billionaire Peter Thiel, described Christopher Columbus as ‘the first multiculturalist’, accused Aimé Césaire of not understanding the transcendental value of The Tempest and advocates for cyberspace, outer space and sea-steading as routes of escape from ‘the ...”

“... by association. Both biographies share an aversion to the twice-told tale (by Ernest Jones and Peter Gay) of an Enlightenment Freud dutiful and dauntless in the stables of irrationality. The new biographers have turned away from prelapsarian universals. Rather than insulate his thought from its darker strains, they side emphatically with his fallibilistic ...”

“... for broad groups of “minorities” ’ – the affirmative action which, he wrongly asserts, Martin Luther King Jr opposed. According to Evans, moreover, the ‘ill-judged 1965 Immigration Reform Act’ – it repealed the restrictive, ethnocentric national origins quotas of the 1924 legislation – transformed the ‘ethnic mix of the country’, as ...”

“... Building of the Missile Base’ – of course – and it might well stand, along with Martin Amis’s prose polemic ‘Thinkability’, as an epigraph to a whole pile of collections whose authors seem to have discovered the joy of family life as if they belonged to the first generation ever to have invented it. John Levett’s ...”

“... Giroux that the feelings in the poems ‘do not represent the feelings of an active homosexual’; Peter Levi that ‘homosexual love was to Elizabethans inevitably chaste.’ Pull the other one, Peter. No one watching Marlowe’s Edward II could have felt for one moment that the relationship between Edward and Gaveston was ...”