“... after taking the overdose: I am ready for death though I fear it. Of course the whole thing may not work and I shall wake up. I don’t really mind either way. Once the decision seems inevitable the courage needed was less than I thought. I don’t quite believe anything has happened though the bottle is empty. At the moment I feel very much ...”

“... and was cheered through the streets of London before being defeated in the Battle of Lincoln in May 1217 and then the Battle of Sandwich in August, perhaps the first ever battle fought by sailing ships in the open sea.Even the fiasco of the last significant French landing, at Fishguard in 1797, had momentous consequences. The fifteen hundred French ...”

“... on the military plan with firearms, request that you proceed with the military option which may include the use of lethal force for the preservation of life.’ This was questionable language in which to couch what was supposedly an instruction to arrest. All the contradictions and inconsistencies in this sequence of events would be instantly resolved ...”

“... supported her lover H.D. and her husband Robert McAlmon, who published Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes and Ernest Hemingway. There is also the suggestion, never quite substantiated by Souhami, that the way these women lived, their promiscuity and outsized influence, could itself be considered uniquely modern, that this was the age of the ‘international daisy ...”

“... stepping into the fray as Docs’ Joshua, sums up the feeling best when he says here: ‘Hunter may be the reincarnation of Lono – the God returned after 1500 years of wandering like a lovesick child to save his people – and his beloved American Constitution ... He is your saviour and he is guardian of all you profess to hold dear. In his weirdness he ...”

“... fear death?’ he was heard to say. ‘It is the most beautiful adventure in life.’ He may have been echoing J.M. Barrie, whose ‘awfully big adventure’ had only recently chimed with children of all ages. But the immediate circumstances – shipwreck, showmanship, early death – also bring to mind the life and career of Robert Louis ...”

“... the measuring instruments he had devised couldn’t be deployed. Alvarez did as he was told, and may have been the first person to describe the appearance of the ‘mushroom cloud’. But he had desperately wanted to be there for the big moment, and even forty years later could still recall his rage: ‘I was absolutely furious, angry with [Oppenheimer] as I ...”

“... Hersh’s questioning to phone the man who had been his immediate superior in Vietnam, Captain Ernest Medina, who, Calley believed, would confirm that everything took place under the captain’s direct order. When Medina said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and hung up, Calley was stricken. ‘He knew … he was going to be the fall guy ...”

“... as significant as evidence gets. But, like a string of previous convictions, it can mislead. It may have been made in fear or distress in order to put an end to an ordeal; it may have come from a compulsive confessor; it may have been made in the hope of securing bail or facing a ...”

“... was a word Pevsner relished.Reilly’s galère left out a number of artists of whose existence he may have been unaware, just as they may have been unaware of each other. Patrick Abercrombie mentioned some of them in the introduction to his Book of the Modern House (1939): ‘Mackintosh with his unrestrained fantasy in ...”

“... DNB, hoped that it would turn out to be one of the ‘most amusing’ of books. This remark may have to be interpreted in the light of the fact that Stephen’s own preferred form of ‘amusement’ involved hanging by his fingertips from a ledge on the Matterhorn in the middle of a blizzard, but it is true that an abundance of pleasure, of a certain ...”

“... Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal ...”

“... study of linguistics, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Milton Friedman in economics, though Keynes may last longer. This doesn’t mean that contemporary US universities aren’t obsessed with ‘theory’, only that the ‘theory’ either comes from outside America, is modelled on economics (which has a strong theory-orientation important for understanding ...”

“... a difficult one. The war hadn’t been going well since the landings in the Pas de Calais in May 1946 were thrown back with terrible losses – a failure that had much to do with the amount of treasure and materiel that had been diverted to Britain’s nuclear weapons programme. The Americans remained preoccupied in the Pacific, still wary of the ...”

“... in Marxist economics. Over recent decades, the landmarks of Marxian economic thinking include Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism (1972), David Harvey’s Limits to Capital (1982), Giovanni Arrighi’s Long 20th Century (1994) and Robert Brenner’s Economics of Global Turbulence (2006), all expressly concerned with the grinding tectonics and punctual ...”