“... agile, but it makes them shallow, and if one does not live in seclusion drains away one’s higher powers of production.’ Yet he also recognised that it was typical of Berliners to complain in this way: ‘The more berlinisch one is, the more one rails or jeers at Berlin.’ Gordon Craig’s Theodor Fontane: Literature and History in the Bismarck Reich is a ...”

“... Politicians and intellectuals – especially on the right – appear to regard Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and John Adams as the American equivalents of Plato, Aristotle, Cato and Brutus, while the wider culture acknowledges the near-superhuman qualities of the men of 1776. The founders in their periwigs, breeches and ...”

“... were detected by oracles, diviners and ‘witch-doctors’, whose diagnostic and therapeutic powers as dispensers of anti-witchcraft magic Zande ascribed to their intimate knowledge of witchcraft. The ‘witch’ so discovered was typically a personal rival and enemy, witchcraft being synonymous with jealousy, envy, spite and hatred. The person whom the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... It is an indication of her independence of mind that among the influences she admitted we find Thomas Hardy, whose poetry, on the face of it, belonged to another age: she took what she wanted wherever it came from. Yet she very well understood the modern American virtues of Williams, Stevens, Cummings, Eliot, Pound, Kenneth Burke and Yvor Winters; and, in ...”

“... Scotland is anything like Ulster. And when the only known Scottish Catholic writer, the novelist Thomas Healy, finally surfaces, he, too, thinks this is a non-question. It’s the first time he’s ever been asked about his religion, he remarks. But as anyone knows who knows Glasgow, this is mostly the burial of consciousness. Scotland can be as impenitently ...”

“... What should we mean by ‘Reformation’? Was it a ‘paradigm shift’ of the kind proposed by Thomas Kuhn, a new set of answers to old questions, a Darwinian moment? Perhaps. For Felipe Fernández-Armesto, whose Reformation was published in 1996, it was not so much an event in the 16th century, or even an extended process, as a constant manifestation of the spirit of Christianity, at least from 1500 to the present day, ‘a continuing story, embracing the common religious experiences of Christians of different traditions worldwide ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... goods up the River Parrett under the name of the Somerset Trading Company. Robert’s younger son, Thomas, married the niece of Samuel Stuckey, the founder of Stuckey’s Bank, a sizeable local house which had already swallowed up several tiddlers. Thomas rose to become vice-chairman, and so in due course did his son ...”