“... Science of Mechanics, a generation after it was published, that fired the imagination of a young Albert ...”

“... decision to sell Louisiana was only one, and perhaps not the most important. Might the aggressive young American republic have found a way to expand westward even if Napoleon had not willingly ceded it the vast, thinly populated and largely undefended Louisiana territory? Quite possibly. Latin American independence would probably have come about as well, even ...”

“... life. The heroine escapes from her family to solitude and books (‘Thomson’s Seasons, Young’s Night-Thoughts and Paradise Lost’), and finds an older woman, Ann, who seems ready to become her life-companion. Ann’s health declines and Mary accompanies her to Lisbon, where she meets Henry, ‘a man of refinement’. But Ann dies, Henry, a ...”

“... been turned over to pedestrian precincts full of boutiques, bars and picture galleries, enjoyed by young technocrat couples (with two cars, two children and one poodle) who drink whisky and are obsessed with their bronzage. But Richard’s greatest contribution to history is surely his understanding of individuals and their behaviour to each other. ‘I have ...”

“... and pheasant to the boys after the annual Ritterakademie ball led to a raid on the stores by a young Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau. General Schleicher dined well at Horcher’s restaurant; Frau Ebert was partial to marzipan tart. General Seeckt drank beer, Ernst Röhm drank wine, Herbert Bismarck drank practically anything (like father, like son). A jolly ...”

“... Karl Löwith were beginning to work through the Weberian legacy, and Heidelberg was home also to a young American called Talcott Parsons, who later presented his own straitjacketed, functionalist version of Weber to an American public, with whom it proved immensely influential – a version that was re-exported back to post-war West Germany as the intellectual ...”

“... their anarchic force and the opposing force holding them in position. Writing in 1896-7, the young Bernhard Berenson spoke of ‘the exquisite modelling of Cézanne, who gives the sky its tactile values as perfectly as Michelangelo has given them to the human figure’. Michelangelo’s is not one of the names commonly brought up in talk about ...”

“... argues for the latter and points out that Wainwright happily organised group outings when he was a young accountant’s clerk. When the couple became estranged, he argues, Wainwright accepted the necessity of being solitary and manufactured virtues from it. It seems more complex than that. I think he embraced the necessity. Assiduously he secreted the ...”

“... not go away. Serious writers seem unable to keep their hands off him, from Beryl Bainbridge’s Young Adolf to George Steiner’s A.H., and the bibliography grows at a pace unmatched by Stalin or Mao. A survey five years ago counted 120,000 pieces of work on Hitler. We have had serious biographers, like Alan Bullock and Joachim Fest, and we have had ...”

“... each of which ended with the resounding failure of the prime minister’s presidential bid.The young Mitterrand’s intuition that the president’s powers would keep growing has proved correct. In 2000, constitutional reform sought to make the risk of cohabitation less likely, by aligning the president’s term with that of the National Assembly: it was ...”

“... David Kohn opens his monumental Darwinian Heritage with a deftly-delivered kick, observing that a study of the wider institutional culture of Darwin’s day seems to be ‘beyond the present ken of historians of 19th-century biology’. It’s a well-aimed blow. Little of the Darwin industry’s capital has been spent on exploring evolution in its social context ...”

“... Kallman in tow) pressed his suit on whatever composers he could. Henze accepted it (Elegy for Young Lovers, The Bassarids); Tippett and Harrison Birtwistle resisted. The latter has worked fruitfully (the small-scale pieces Bow Down and Yan Tan Tethera) with Tony Harrison, another poet avid for theatrical and operatic activity; and his most recent ...”

“... a right to give laws to Americans. When the Clinton impeachment was going forward, Obama was a young Chicago politician with other things on his mind. He could have learned something then about how the Republicans work. The most questionable of his appeals in the primary campaign against Hillary Clinton was the endlessly repeated bromide with which he ...”

“... think that they could get a good picture of my life from these pages; but it is not so.’ David Newsome, invited and challenged, has entered the labyrinth, drawing the rest of us with him into an implacable game initiated by the diarist. The mirrors and images multiply, with Newsome, the reviewer and the reader locked together in observation, and the ...”

“... Adjustment, no matter how comfortable it appears to be, is never freedom.’ David Reisman said that in The Lonely Crowd, a work of academic/pop sociology, published in the US in the late Forties; much read and remarked on at the time, and now forgotten. I looked it up the other day when I was due to say something at the South Bank Centre in connection with the Cities on the Move exhibition at the Hayward ...”