“... the Whigs have often been dismissed as a party of frivolous aristocrats playing at politics, who took up various reforming causes only to drop them when they seriously threatened Whig interests. This is a rather harsh view, and one would expect Holland House to play a part in its refutation. For in a period when the landed aristocracy possessed vast ...”

“... in an interview, ‘is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest.’ He took from Nietzsche what he needed – the critical element, everything that is exemplified in the phrase ‘genealogy of morals’ – leaving the metaphysics of the will to power, the Übermensch and much else. What was important to him in Nietzsche was not so ...”

“... other’s eyes, just as you have seen the untamed things of the wild. Poor Little Woman! ... I took her by the shoulders and placed myself in front of her. With my right I forced the father back, while the left arm held off the son. ‘Enough of that,’ I said. ‘Listen to me. I’ll knock down the one who strikes first, without the slightest ...”

“... was the son of an architect who had learned his profession under the comfortably traditionalist John Nash, but his own vision, actuated by the ‘throb of possibility’ (lovely, phrase), was engaged with the architecture of the future as embodied in Fontaine’s designs. He was a practical idealist, and the heart of the novel is the fate of his dream. The ...”

“... His first paragraph is a model: No conquest is free of catastrophe. Duke William came and took what he wanted. And of course there were those who got hurt. But obvious though that is, revisionist historians today dwell less on the changes imposed by the Normans than on what they were content to leave alone. That is not the way it looks in the building ...”

“... There was firepower enough to mash up a vast landscape and wreck the water table, but it still took hundreds of rounds to kill one man. Most of the book deals with the shifting battle tactics of Gough and General Sir Herbert Plumer, who commanded the Second Army, as seen from command level (a good overall map of the entire Western Front would have been a ...”

“... of climatic change. This tradition has been continued recently among Anglophone historians by John Pryor’s analysis of how the patterns of weather, winds, currents and coastal topography in the Mediterranean shaped its economic and military history, by Keith Thomas’s Man and the Natural World and by the work of Donald Worster and Alfred Crosby. If ...”

“... body to body, remains consistent. ‘It was not sex,’ but neither (to pick up an echo from John Donne) was it a mixing of souls. In ‘The Missing’, Gunn writes of his friends as ‘an involved increasing family’ (another family) of gay lovers: Contact of friend led to another friend, Supple entwinement through the living mass Which for all that I ...”

“... mechanism of a phenomenon is very different from being able to mitigate its impact. The physicist John Tyndall identified the greenhouse effect in 1860, but generations of scientists have failed to instigate reforms that might slow it down. Perhaps it would be better to focus not on explaining the science, but on exposing the political and industrial ...”

“... the Vleeshuis, sitting on fine Spanish leather chairs embossed with the figure of their patron, St John, accompanied by his flock of sheep and oxen; in the evenings, they retired to estates built on acres of quiet pasture just outside the city, with names like De Ribbe (the Rib) or De Ijseren Verckens (the Iron Pigs), Dlammeken (the Little Lamb) or ’t ...”

“... poverty and racism here and now, not wait for the collapse of the global capitalist order.’ John Caputo argued along these lines in After the Death of God (2007): I would be perfectly happy if the far-left politicians in the United States were able to reform the system by providing universal healthcare, effectively redistributing wealth more equitably ...”

“... The Prussian scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who carried the instrument with him on his travels, took a reading of 46 during his ascent of Mount Chimborazo in the Andes in 1802. The diagram of Mount Chimborazo from Humboldt’s ‘Geography of Plants’ (1807). Humboldt was born in 1769. His scientific activities would be impossible to confine within ...”

“... hands. Peter Cook’s venture, the Establishment, was taken over by gangsters in 1963; in 1972 John Aspinall sold the Clermont to Playboy as its main London casino. In 1976, George Marks, a jovial Canadian-American property developer with a silver Rolls-Royce, offered to liberate the National Liberal Club from its debts, hoping that he would in return be ...”

“... Kungsholm, pride of neutral Sweden, was sold in mid-war to America, converted to trooping as the John Ericsson, then sold back after the war to her original owners. In a burst of postwar activity, before the jet age took over, the Americans made the running on the Atlantic. In 1952 the United States, ‘long believed ...”

“... master of ceremonies, unwilling or unable to prevent himself interrupting the proceedings. As John Bayley put it a few years back, one primary object of a Barnes novel ‘is to dazzle and bemuse the reader throughout with the knowledge and reminder that this is a very clever young person writing a very clever and witty novel’. The most obvious ...”