“... them, his aim was to impose his own conscience as the rule of everyone else’s actions. Sorel took pleasure in teasing liberal intellectuals about the failings of their hero, but behind the teasing was the serious thought that the moral reformation that Socrates demanded of his hearers was invariably the first step towards tyranny. I.F. Stone belongs ...”

“... Jews in public’. Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose genocidal outbursts have been meticulously recorded by John Röhl, said of Kristallnacht that it made him ashamed of being a German. These hesitations become important when we consider another category that forms part of Goldhagen’s evidence, namely opponents of the Nazi regime, even active members of the ...”

“... I don’t want to pretend that Machiavelli was actually a classic liberal, a precursor of John Locke, celebrating individual rights, the public/private distinction and the rule of law. The sanguine suggestion that a new ruler might make himself secure in regard to the political class by ‘doing away with them’ is enough to dispel any thought of ...”

“... workshop, which was eventually moved to Berlin. When the elder Menzel died, his 16-year-old son took over the family business. He briefly attended the Art Academy in Berlin, but quickly dropped out and went back to work. His fortunes changed in 1839, when he was commissioned to make 400 illustrations for a history of Frederick the Great; drawing them and ...”

“... longest-running experiment in the history of science. The Park Grass Experiment, set up in 1856 by John Bennet Lawes at Rothamsted in Hertfordshire, has now been running more than five times longer than its nearest rival, and still yields results of use to plant ecologists. The original object was to assess the effects of different fertilisation regimes on a ...”

“... he called ‘gemmules’. August Weisman, one of the greatest zoologists of the late 19th century, took things much further by speculating that the elements of heredity were stored in the substance ‘of a definite chemical, and above all, molecular composition’ which he called ‘germ-plasm’; and that the germ-plasm stored in germ cells was ‘held in ...”

“... editor of this posthumous collection of essays by J.B. Harley, bellwether of the new geography, took the unusual precaution of including a critical introduction by J.H. Andrews, for fear that Harley’s approach might become ‘an unquestioned orthodoxy or worse, a catechism’. Just what that approach was defies easy summary because it hybridised so many ...”

“... 1581, and then a number of letters – business letters, essentially – to his half-brother Sir John Gilbert about privateering, shipping and local matters. There is nothing about the Virginia (Roanoke) Plantation, his rise at Court in the 1580s, or his intellectual activities. Only in his correspondence with Sir Robert Cecil in the 1590s do the letters ...”

“... drawings, the bright colours they prepared and used. After going to agricultural college, Malevich took a job with a railway company, saving his money and painting (he sold some of these works, though none has survived). Eventually, he had accumulated enough cash to make the long train journey to Moscow, where he arrived in 1904, already in his late ...”

“... first husband, ‘knew every painting’ in Venice and they bought some old furniture together. John Holms, for whom she left Vail, seems to have been less well informed. ‘In Toledo,’ she tells us, ‘we spent the whole day searching for El Greco’s painting of that city, not knowing that it was in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.’ Alfred ...”

“... US for assistance and feel betrayed when it fails to arrive. ‘Liberia is small America,’ says John Dahn, one of thousands of people who took refuge in Monrovia’s main sports stadium during the recent fighting. ‘Whenever we have problems we call on America to help.’ Liberia’s colonial experience is both more ...”

“... a marauding Danish general, kicked his head around in triumph. Conversely, the public hanging of John Platts outside Derby County Jail in April 1847 drew a crowd of twenty thousand – descendants of the ‘seething mob’ that played Shrove Tuesday football. When the FA was founded in 1863 it knew it was in direct competition for crowd support with public ...”

“... Similar horrors confronted Wotton when accompanying Essex’s Irish campaign in 1599; he took with him a verse-letter from his university friend John Donne, though for Rutter ‘it’s anyone’s guess how, as a soldier headed into a guerrilla war, he read the fantastically tortured images Donne wrapped around ...”

“... we in a Catholic church?’ She had once stabbed a priest to death in a film involving John Mills so knew about churches. ‘Yes,’ she said firmly. At which point a plumpish man in a cassock crossed the chancel in order to collect a book from a pew, bowing to the altar en route. ‘See that,’ said the interviewer. ‘The bowing? That’s part ...”

“... double bed. He raised one arm to greet me, and with the other switched off the television. ‘I took some of that stuff you gave me,’ he said, ‘and it’s a bit better. No need to fuss.’ But he was gritting his teeth. He was wearing Fentanyl patches, which soaked an opiate through his skin directly into the bloodstream, but I’d also given him a ...”