“... a book published in 1990, the American historian Paul Breines argues that a significant change took place in the self-image of the American Jew after 1967. Breines examined films, books and magazines in which American Jews had traditionally portrayed themselves as mild, bookish and wise human beings, not given to retaliation or unprovoked violence. After ...”

“... community after talks between the Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams, and the SDLP leader, John Hume. Milltown was thus the feared or presumed setting for a showpiece atrocity, the funeral a shop-window for Loyalist marksmanship and ordnance-nous. It was a cold afternoon, but tension just shaded it, driving out the cold. The air above the city was ...”

“... on the subject has been brought together on this scale. Gash shows that costumes for bathing took a long time to be accepted in 19th-century England (longer than in Belgium), and that considerable naked exposure by both sexes was normal at least until the 1870s. He also has fine sections on the fashion for beards and on smoking, topics which are opened ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the press organs in that difficult period, was supported from time to time by the Government. John Walter II, no longer having that support, switched into opposition in 1820 and supported Queen Caroline against George IV. Whether or not his motives were disinterested, his sales more than doubled. There is nothing like sexual scandal and public passion to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... There are Lennonesque conceptual twisters: (There was a maid her   name was Jim they always took her   name for him). There is an epic which refuses the consolations of mythologising (‘News of Warring Clans’); a prose work which traces the route by which value thins out into exchange value (‘A Note on Metal’); and the deliciously funny and ...”

“... taxes on America, in the shape of the Townshend Acts of 1767 (to which other Americans like John Dickinson and Samuel Adams responded with ever more ingenious arguments like the right of Parliament to legislate for the colonies, as against tax them), Franklin wrote his son William ‘that no middle doctrine can be well maintained ... Something might be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to find too much going on’ there. The calm was disturbed by members of a new team assembled by John von Neumann, the legendary mathematician. Von Neumann too had spent much of the war at Los Alamos. There, he was gripped by a vision as remarkable as Charles Babbage’s a century before: perhaps one could build a machine to calculate. Von Neumann was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... concepts of common sense together into a revolutionary package. From the Aberdeen ministers Paine took the idea that human nature itself led to belief in certain principles, and that the insights of ordinary people had more to recommend them than the lucubrations of over-educated philosophers. But he also insisted that ordinary people needed to be shaken out ...”

“... the Lame’). He came into the full light of history only in the 1360s. In 1366, he took control of Samarkand, the city that was to be his capital. In 1372, he invaded Khorezm. Other invasions followed: Moghulistan (1375-76), Khorasan (1381), Caspian territories (1382), Azerbaijan (1386), Asia Minor (1387), Russia (1390-91), Georgia ...”

“... familiar in Civil War hauntings as well). One who makes regular reappearances is the British spy John André, who was captured at Tarrytown and hanged at Tappan for his supposedly traitorous collaboration with Benedict Arnold. André was an attractive felon: even Americans called him ‘beautiful’, ‘manly’ and ‘noble’, and his charmed memory ...”

“... genial voice of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). The narrator’s name is Silver, as in Long John. She lives with her mother in Salts, in the far north-west of Scotland near Cape Wrath: ‘cliff-perched, wind-cleft’, a ‘Fossil Town’, ‘salted and preserved by the sea that had destroyed it too’. When her mother falls to her death, Silver and her ...”