“... defences were in place in advance: ‘All is I suppose as well as can be expected by one with my powers of expectation.’ Thus armoured, he could allow himself to send his version of a cheery wave from holiday in Italy: ‘Nothing to tell that’s not better untold. Aches worse than in Paris, weather filthy.’ The line between stoicism and vindication ...”

“... German science has never recovered. Individuals such as Arnold Schoenberg, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, along with cultural institutions like the Frankfurt School and the Bauhaus, benefited the countries to which they fled, leaving Germany a cultural desert. For Blackbourn​ , the origins of Nazism can be located not in the long run of German ...”

“... minds: ‘By some it was considered as only a ladies’ game, by others as quite beyond their powers.’ The male gaze tended to concentrate on the length of the ladies’ skirts, an obsession which persisted right up to the lace knickers sported by ‘Gorgeous Gussie’ Moran in 1949, designed by Teddy Tinling, whose costumes often took up more column ...”

“... leading management books of the Eighties have been American, and ‘excellence’ is their creed. Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman Junior’s In Search of Excellence1 appeared in 1982 and it quickly established itself as the best-selling management book ever. Here was an unambiguous riposte to the Japanese economic miracle, that Pearl Harbour of the Carter ...”

“... whose only comfort was the bouquet of wines maturing in their big oak casks. Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, a BBC man, was one of the correspondents in attendance, and described Alexander’s manner as that of a ‘headmaster disappointed at some misdemeanour in the Upper School’.He admitted that the Beachhead landing hadn’t gone as he had hoped: ‘We ...”

“... yet with an intense analytical focus. Among current practitioners of the social sciences only Thomas Schelling and Amos Tversky come to mind as demonstrating to the same extent Hirschman’s quality of controlled imagination. Yet Hirschman is not a part of the social-science establishment. This has nothing to do with his European origins. Many of the ...”

“... Royal Academy, only a few years after its founding in 1768; and it was there that he may have met Thomas Rowlandson, the other outstanding caricaturist of his generation.Alice Loxton spins her exuberant popular history around that friendship, and calls on their mutual friend Henry Angelo for testimony on Gillray’s early mastery: ‘The facility with which ...”

“... its own post-independence path. Why should left-leaning states in the Third World and ex-colonial powers, harping on the rights they had denied in the past, tell Hassan to mind his manners when he was balancing the pursuit of modernity with a revival of sovereign traditions that colonialism had stifled or exploited? Many former colonies were faced with the ...”

“... Jane is so slipshod I cry. Evil dissolves, & love, like foam; that love. Prattle of children powers me home, my heart claps like the swan’s under a frenzy of who love me & who shine.Homage to Mistress Bradstreet is much admired and little read, its clotted syntax not permitting enough air to let the piece breathe. One feels the strain in its ...”

“... can be turned by the poet into deathless verse. When Charsky first tested the improviser’s powers, he asked him to declaim on the theme of inspiration, and the Italian made a magnificent defence of the poet’s freedom to scorn the crowd and choose any subject he wishes, even the most trivial and vulgar one, ‘as the great eagle sails past tower and ...”

“... analyses ‘The Journal of the House of Lords for the Long Parliament’. There is nothing on Sir Thomas More. Few of the contributors are former pupils. The five most distinguished are neither pupils nor colleagues nor even Americans. A specially commissioned article by a professor of philosophy, Louis O. Mink, discusses Hexter’s theories of history ...”

“... for example, in Ulysses between the book’s musclebound organisation and its infinitely supple powers of description. But in Post-Modernism the dialectic collapsed, leaving nothing but empty structures. Butler warns against nostalgia for the great achievements of the Modernists, yet everything in his book confirms the apothegm: Post-Modernism, homo tristis ...”

“... of 17th-century political articulacy below the level of political privilege. It was at Putney that Thomas Rainborough spoke for ‘the poorest he that lives in England’, and that he heard, in the pleas of Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton for the rights of property, ‘nothing at all that can convince me, why any man that is born in England ought not to ...”

“... to dress up outing Thiel as his own statement of principle. Gawker’s Silicon Valley editor Owen Thomas (who is himself gay) had written:How many out VCs do you know? I think it explains a lot about Thiel: his disdain for convention, his quest to overturn established rules. Like the immigrant Jews who created Hollywood a century ago, a gay investor has no ...”

“... 1794 the runners were working for the Home Office, employed in the surveillance of radicals. When Thomas Hardy, secretary of the London Corresponding Society, was arrested prior to his trial (and eventual acquittal) for high treason, among those who came for him, at six in the morning when he and his wife were asleep, were the two most high-profile runners in ...”