“... twitching, pockmarked … and distinctly careless about his dress’ and his ‘remarkable powers of locution’. Nokes focuses throughout on Johnson’s independence, his taking control of situations that threatened to render him powerless. The book begins with Johnson’s cold reception at Pembroke College when he returned to Oxford in 1754 in order ...”

“... clear: I define … matter … to be a substance possessed of the property of extension, and of powers of attraction or repulsion. And since it has never yet been asserted, that the powers of sensation and thought are incompatible with these … I therefore maintain, that we have no reason to suppose that there are in man ...”

“... hosts is called Through the Looking-Glass, and its pilot episode features Jonathan Miller and Richard Gregory talking animatedly about mirrors and doubles, both of which figure prominently in A Whistling Woman’s own symbolic repertoire. (As she did in Babel Tower, where she brought on Anthony Burgess as a witness for the defence in her fictional ...”

“... to recapture our capital city from an occupying army of lobbyists and registered agents of foreign powers hired to look out for everybody and everything except the national interest of the United States.’ Buchanan’s campaign faltered and was wound up by the summer of 1992. Francis was satisfied nonetheless: ‘Mr Buchanan’s presidential campaign was only ...”

“... interpret and apply them. There is here a unique interpenetration of the legislative and judicial powers, for what an Act of Parliament means is what the courts decide it means. Once it has spoken, Parliament has no continuing interpretative function. The need for the courts both to be loyal to Parliament’s prescriptions and to try to do justice has ...”

“... the top, tells of the Gulf of Tonkin incident and President Johnson’s request for war-making powers in Indo-China. The second headline, also right across the page in what must have been a tough day for sub-editors, reports the FBI’s discovery of three corpses, believed to be of three missing civil-rights workers, in a swamp in Mississippi. For me, and ...”

“... the traditional view, or cliché, that the Cold War was a struggle between two Enlightenment powers – one focused on liberty, the other on equality – and that both powers, having jointly defeated Hitler in the Second World War, were convinced that history was on their side. As Moyn sees it, only the Soviet Union ...”

“... in defence of Tudor England are interesting, given their – sometimes exaggerated – support for Richard III against Henry VII in 1485 and the widespread support for the Pilgrimage of Grace, the massive northern revolt against Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1536: dislike of Scotland trumped dislike of the Tudors. The recent coverage of the ...”

“... their carrot and stick ways by the Wellesley brothers (Arthur, the future duke of Wellington, and Richard). They took Low under their wing. His career as company handyman had begun. Men like Low were crucial to company rule in India. When he arrived in Jaipur in 1825 on his first big posting, the company’s resources were at full stretch. Two ...”

“... including Joe McCarthy and George Wallace. Not to mention more respectable types such as Richard Nixon, whose ‘Southern strategy’ offered a blueprint for mobilising white resentment over the gains of the Civil Rights movement. (That ‘respectable’ and ‘Nixon’ can be included in the same sentence illustrates how far our political standards ...”

“... periods of political emergency in which there is a chance of justice for those whom the ruling powers hope to erase from the historical record. This montage of moments represents the history of the oppressed, which is as diffuse and discontinuous as a modernist work of art. Only with the coming of the Messiah can this history be recounted as a coherent ...”

“... helmets, and on and on), the dismissive spelling ‘elf n safety’ used by journalists such as Richard Littlejohn to suggest that it’s an infantilising regime run by ignorant jobsworths obscures the fact that since 1975 there has been a reduction of four-fifths in workplace deaths and of well over two-thirds in reported workplace injuries. As SB ...”

“... had the Hebrew rites administered at her bedside: In her, like us, there clash’d, contending powers, Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome, The strife, the mixture in her soul, are ours; Her genius and her glory are her own. Like a contemporary cultural theorist musing over Madonna, Arnold takes hold of the dead actress and refashions her as a ...”

“... they were able to draw. The study of these two men turns into a study of the development of the powers of the state in Early Modern Europe, and affords insights which can be used towards the understanding not only of France and Spain but of other countries such as England. The work, in fact, is of the quality we are used to expecting of Professor ...”

“... or to atone by serving in the King’s Army, but fatally drawn to highway robbery. The rector, Richard de Folville, was eventually dragged from his church by armed men and beheaded on the spot. ‘The records reveal so many thugs in holy orders,’ Spraggs writes, ‘that it has even been suggested that the astute professional malefactor may well have ...”