“... The​ Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus liked to look on the bright side. True, that hasn’t been the usual assessment: his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was intended to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government ...”

“... of all nations, has bowed down lowest in his presence. The ‘24-carat taste buds’ belong to Robert Parker, a 57-year-old former Baltimore lawyer, who started the bimonthly subscription-only Wine Advocate in 1978, and whose many books on the world’s wines – Bordeaux, The Wines of the Rhône Valley and Provence (1987) and various editions of the ...”

“... the average Yugoslav and why the average Scot earns less than the average English man or woman. Michael Porter’s The Competitive Advantage of Nations is audacious (or foolhardy) enough to offer an answer. Its aim is nothing less than a systematic explanation of the wealth of nations, with 52 pages of policy recommendations added on for good ...”

“... thereupon knew what he must do with his life. The story fits almost too neatly with that of Michael Ventris, the decipherer of Linear B, who went with a school party at the age of 14 to a London exhibition of Greek and Minoan artefacts and happened to hear Sir Arthur Evans no less, the excavator of Knossos, explain that no one had yet been able to ...”

“... his novels, and there was another in 1970, when the same edition was republished with prefaces by Michael Holroyd. Gerhardie himself prefixed to the reissue of his first book, Futility, an important essay called ‘My Literary Credo’, which is unfortunately omitted from the new Penguin Modern Classics reprint. (Futility is the only novel in ...”

“... wit when it is devoted to the repression, rather than the defence, of religious dissent. As Michael Wilding points out in Dragons Teeth, changes made by Sir Thomas Browne to Religio Medici in the political crisis of 1642-3 reveal the famously ambiguous wit of that text as defensively conservative. The critical climate is now changing. The books under ...”

“... its corporate unfriendliness. What was good for GM was generally seen as bad for America. In 1989 Michael Moore’s film Roger and Me, recording the cataclysmic effects of GM’s closure of its Flint factory, was a huge box-office success: the one thing everyone now knew about GM was that the corporation – specifically, Roger Smith – had put forty ...”

“... Howe and Eudora Welty. These and other signatories – the economist Kenneth Arrow, the poet Robert Penn Warren – were the critical intellectual core, the steady moral centre of American public life. But who, now, would sign such a protest? Liberalism in the United States today is the politics that dares not speak its name. And those who style ...”

“... the impossible. Bear in mind that even in this group there are sharp differences in ability. As Robert X. Cringely, a (pseudonymous) commentator on the computer business who in 1991 published Accidental Empires, the first and still the best book on the growth of the industry, explains: at the extreme edge of the normal distribution, there are programmers ...”

“... for it. In England, reputed ‘conjurors’ like John Dee, Thomas Hariot, William Warner and Robert Fludd were engaged in important transitional research in such areas as engineering, optics, cartography, pharmacy and metallurgy. They were early technologists, though still working within an animistic, non-scientific context. A formative influence here ...”

“... No one ever failed more completely to be the hero of his own life than the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, for whom heroism was an obsession. He used his own head as a model for Christ, Solomon, Alexander and Marcus Curtius and believed that heroic history painting was the highest form of art. Today his only generally remembered work is a portrait of Wordsworth ...”

“... cases.’ The dilemma facing indigenous members of the security forces is well described by Michael Asher, a former soldier in the Parachute Regiment who also served in the SASTA and in the Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Patrol Group. In his book Shoot to kill he explains the motivation of RUC officers: Most RUC men were scrupulously honest. They ...”

“... of Lord of Appeal in Ordinary to ensure that only real judges would sit in future. That it was, in Robert Stevens’s words in the Dickson and Carmichael volume, ‘the work of a group of right-wing Tory MPs who cared nothing for law, the courts or litigants, but were anxious to prop up the hereditary principle by creating a group of judges who might balance ...”

“... Philip Larkin’, etc? If he despises William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, Gertrude Stein, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, Edith Sitwell, Augustus John and Ted Hughes, what’s the merit of vulgarity and spleen? Many trees have been cut down to make the paper on which Grigson has spewed his contempt for teachers, critics, literary editors, the scholars ...”

“... hand, to do Monica for the wireless. She went to Hollywood for the first time in the Sixties, when Robert Aldrich, resisting the advances of Bette Davis, asked her to repeat her portrayal of June Buckridge in the film version of Frank Marcus’s The Killing of Sister George. Sister George was an important turning-point. Her career had brought her to the ...”