“... 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 ...”

“... of mind occasioned by a superabundant flow of inspiration’, which would be a confirmation of the powers expected of Wordsworth. But Jonathan Wordsworth offered what has probably become the mainstream view: ‘this’ is a disorientating sense of sudden disability, of colossal hopes unexpectedly embarrassed. The questions, according to this view, are full of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... critical assassins: Carl Weber (‘a boorish vulgarian’), Robert Gittings (‘unscrupulous’), Richard Purdy (‘incapable of psychological insight into sexual matters’) and Michael Millgate (‘prim’), the devoted Hardy scholars who have given us studies of the work, an edition of the letters and several biographies. In an argument never explicitly ...”

“... of the drug traffic; a century and a half ago, a card-carrying progressive would have sworn, as Richard Cobden did, by phrenology. When invited to lend our ears to what is obvious to all men of good will, phrenology should always come to mind. At an individual level, today’s Lib Dems are hardly rooted in the great continuities of history. A 1992 survey of ...”

“... results, I told him proudly, in the partition calculus he’d invented with his fellow Hungarian Richard Rado; I was also trying to settle a conjecture in infinite combinatorics – that there was no infinite descending sequence of countable order types. He ignored the first, questioned me about the second, thought for a few mom ents, then shrugged – which ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the soul – now had to be something not shared with any other animal. The great anatomist Richard Owen therefore claimed to find such unique structures, and long continued to maintain their uniqueness in the face of plain evidence from T.H. Huxley that they were present in apes as well. When this kind of rearguard defence finally failed, the debate ...”

“... the military preparations of the belligerents,2 the inability or unwillingness of the Great Powers to prevent the outbreak of war during the July crisis, and the first battles culminating in the German setback on the Marne, Tuchman concludes that faults in pre-war planning were responsible for the deadlock in the west; and that this deadlock, ‘fixed ...”

“... The male armadillo also, as Buffon coyly puts it, ‘shows external signs of great progenitive powers’, that is, it has a penis two-thirds the length of its body. After observing, with some inaccuracy, that the armadillo’s shell was like that of a turtle or a crawfish, Buffon asserted that a good description, without definitions ... a particular ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... against the quiet obscurity that satisfied Emily Dickinson, her near contemporary. She married Richard Stoddard, a fervent would-be poet who was never to falter in his support of her aspirations, moved to New York, and cultivated bookish acquaintances. Money was always short, largely because she spent more than she earned. Much of her writing was directed ...”