“... agency or another. In Dead Lions, Diana Taverner, head of operations at the Park (Kristin Scott Thomas on the telly), says to a subordinate: ‘I sometimes worry you’re going over to the enemy.’ He looks ‘shocked’ and replies: ‘MI6?’ She says she means her boss at MI5. It’s a joke, but it’s funny because it’s true. The exchange ...”

“... restricts national power. In recent opinions, Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have described the political system established by the Constitution as a confederation of quasi-sovereign States, leaving almost no role for the federal government. Having a written constitution, clearly, does not preclude bitter controversy over how the ...”

“... that of Sassoon and Blunden than to that of Lewis and Carrington. My maternal grandfather, Rolfe Scott-James, was a literary critic, a sombre, self-consciously intellectual figure, a friend of Ford Madox Ford and Thomas Hardy. In 1912, he had published an essay in which he expressed satisfaction that, in the new age of ...”

“... straining after girlishness at the age of 34. But then her whole life, and career, were a strain. Scott Fitzgerald said on Thalberg’s death, ‘The Golden Bowl is broken,’ and the same might be said for Shearer’s career. A more accurate portrait of the Thalberg-Shearer ménage than the rabbi’s can be found in Fitzgerald’ short story ‘Crazy ...”

“... her name was eclipsed by that of another – unrelated – historian of the Glorious Revolution, Thomas Babington Macaulay. Catharine Macaulay’s career has, however, come back into focus since Bridget Hill’s 1992 biography. More recently Karen Green’s perceptive study, Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment (2020), has drawn attention to the ...”

“... It would be quite possible to read about Edward Thomas and wonder how it was that so many people made such allowances for him. A man who had a house built for himself and then refused to live in it, he tormented his wife and children with his restlessness – he calculated he was never happy for more than a quarter of an hour in the day ...”

“... mail, is seeing our most able Artists & Scientists leave for London – their places taken by Thomas Cook’s travellers, decked in tartan, looking for ‘The Picturesque’. It is the end of an old song.Enough of this. They have bought few of my Pictures, but there is time. A kiss to you & your aunt Mary.Your loving father     *With every step of ...”

“... north, across the Solway Firth some fifty miles away, I can see hills that Burns, Hogg and Walter Scott would have known.’ It is also from the west the prevailing weather comes ‘unhindered … like Thor’s fucking hammer’. Pickard holed up at the café for the next ten years. In March this year, a few months after his book appeared, the building burned ...”

“... found which named the Guggenheim as a target. Two years earlier, when the Foundation’s director, Thomas Krens, was finalising a deal with the Basque authorities, he received a letter from Herri Batasuna (HB), the party widely regarded as ETA’s political wing, asking him to postpone the project until a more inclusive consultation about the museum’s ...”

“... Iraq. Machon is an important witness, but only a small cog in the conspiracy, which, as the Scott Inquiry hearings are beginning tentatively to reveal, was just as ‘wide-ranging’ and ‘sophisticated’ as the US operation from which it took its lead. Saddam sought to build up his links with Britain, which had so many historical associations with ...”

“... The story of Doubting Thomas, examined at length in this learned and fascinating book, has its origin in a brief passage near the end of St John’s Gospel. After the crucifixion, when the disciples were assembled behind locked doors ‘for fear of the Jews’, Jesus appeared among them and displayed the wounds in his hands and side ...”

“... between them and their often disparate specialities have never previously been explored. Walter Scott and Victor Hugo feature among the less familiar scholars, and some painters, including Bonnington and Delacroix, make brief appearances. As these names suggest, Hill has much to tell us about Anglo-French relations, present as well as past.We learn, for ...”

“... Smith’s resistance is directed in detail against two anthropologists, Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran, whose analyses of religion are based on evolutionary psychology. Their approach, which she calls the ‘new naturalism’, holds that the operation of human minds can be understood largely through the identification of various subsystems or modules ...”

“... Village. It was an odd combination of Ford’s collection mania (Lincoln’s Illinois courtroom, Thomas Edison’s lab, the homes of Patrick Henry, Daniel Webster, Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe, Luther Burbank’s botanical lab, the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop and so on) and a lovingly replicated small Midwestern town complete with a town ...”

“... and comparatively richer in recent decades has been evidenced in great statistical detail by Thomas Piketty in Capital in the 21st Century. While the two world wars and the world depression of the first half of the 20th century entailed a massive destruction of accumulated wealth which, however catastrophic, did reduce inequality, the postwar peace has ...”