“... Forum, Jacobs had contrasted ‘Olympian’ town planners such as New York’s quango despot Robert Moses, addicted to models and graphics, seldom getting out of their cars, with ‘pavement-pounders’ like Bacon and the shopping mall designer Victor Gruen, who knew Philadelphia well and explored it on foot. But when Bacon took her to a ‘bad ...”

“... Padua was not an independent city-state. The English College at Douai did not train Jesuits, and Robert Parsons, who was not a doctor, had nothing to do with founding it. Giordano Bruno was not born at Nova. Thomas Norton was not assistant torturer to Richard Topcliffe, but the other way round. There was no British army in 1586. Not all of this is ...”

“... great resemblance between his own, open-ended journey and the intrusions of earlier strangers: of Robert Moffat, Livingstone and various envoys of the London Missionary Society, who thrived on scruples; of Cecil Rhodes, and an assortment of English and Boer traders, who did without them; of the Voortrekkers, who left the Cape in sombre spirits and travelled ...”

“... made some contribution, notably in adding references to drawings by Leonardo in his possession. He may also be the source for a brief passage about the unfinished Adoration of the Magi, now in the Uffizi. Although it was the most significant work by Leonardo in Florence, it had not been mentioned in the first edition. The 1568 Life had already been printed ...”

“... book editors made themselves great by ignoring this advice. The best of them – Maxwell Perkins, Robert Giroux, Joe Fox, Bennett Cerf – allowed many brilliant young things to roll about on their front lawns, and some days they even took a drink in the company of these writers, or let their dogs loose to lick their fidgety, callused hands. A sad ...”

“... the fancy of generations of historians. There was one notable exception among the scholars: Robert Tucker put a dashing young revolutionary – someone who might have stepped out of the Baader-Meinhof Group or the Weathermen – on the cover of Stalin as Revolutionary (1973). But the ‘grey blur’ remained, no doubt partly in reaction against ...”

“... experience. The future is something which we fear, even if it does still titillate the ear. This may reflect an imaginative paralysis of our causal understanding or it may reflect simply an improvement in our intellectual judgment. (It is hard soberly to imagine a human future at any point in time which did not offer some ...”

“... when Armageddon was scheduled to begin, was the civilian hero of the Gulf War. The only thing that may have puzzled them was his title. How could a man edit reports coming from all quarters of the globe if he deliberately isolated himself under conditions of siege? On this matter From the House of War provides little help, except for a passing reference to the ...”

“... of the radicals, in order to demonstrate that as a result of those activities the King “may” have been killed, and “must” have been put in danger of his life’. These arguments were first unveiled in September 1794 in the indictments against Thomas Hardy, shoemaker and secretary of the LCS, John Horne Tooke, philologist and radical man of ...”

“... motions but we’re no longer in control.’ I received this text message on 9 August 2009 from Robert Bourgi, known in Paris as ‘the attorney of la Françafrique’. It’s probably not the last word on France’s incestuous relationship with her former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, but it put an end to my four-day wait at a rat-infested border ...”

“... Robert Nozick begins his clever and implausible study Anarchy, State and Utopia with a confident pronouncement: ‘Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).’ Among Americans it is a claim which only a committed utilitarian is likely to wish to dispute ...”

“... the issues they proposed, largely accounted for the reception of The Orators when it appeared in May 1932. By the end of that year, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified ...”

“... 20th-century premier. It wasn’t all bad. By the time he had been forced out by Churchill in May 1940, as a result of the failed Norwegian campaign, his stock had sunk fairly low but, as Robert Self points out, he continued to serve in Churchill’s government to such good effect that the latter made no bones about ...”

“... Alice Vavasor leaves her second love to go back to the first, her father says: ‘But you may change your mind again.’ Alice found that this was hard to bear and hard to answer; but there was a certain amount of truth in the grievous reproach conveyed in her father’s words, which made her bow her neck to it. ‘I have no right to say that it is ...”

“... anyone it can accuse of spreading ‘chaos and disorder’. The blunt rhetoric of its communiqués may be refreshing after the speeches of Mubarak, his son Gamal and the industrialists who dominated the ruling National Democratic Party, with their formulaic promises of reform and their talk of the nobility of the Egyptian people but ten days ago in Tahrir ...”