“... valley and also carried on a rich maritime trade from the South China coast, represented a naval power such as the Mongols had never encountered before. They decided first of all to outflank it, driving south through the rugged terrain of West China-terrain so difficult that when Mao made his Long March through it in the opposite direction, escaping from the ...”

“... Similar doubts apply to Goldhagen’s treatment of the popular mood after Hitler came to power. One of the Nazis’ first acts was to suspend civil liberties in general, not just those of Jews. Most of the inmates of the first concentration camp, Dachau, were political opponents rather than racial victims. Public protests were few, whoever the ...”

“... of capital investment, commercialisation, and the exercise of political, military and ideological power by predatory elites and their associates.’ Periods of lessened inequality, Scheidel aims to show, have rarely, if ever, been the result of a simple improvement in the income of the poorest sectors of a population. Instead, they have been the result of a ...”

“... a kind of celebrity in this period that they probably could not have attained before or after. As Jonathan Rose has observed about the explosion of print towards the close of the 19th century: ‘Lord Salisbury’s oft-quoted sneer – “Written by office boys for office boys” – accurately summed up a revolutionary social fact: journalism had opened an ...”

“... got American technology, which was increasingly becoming more important to sigint than mere mental power, and which did require great material resources – mostly to build and launch orbital satellites. (Britain’s attempt to compete with the US here, the Zircon project, collapsed in 1987.) But the alliance came at a price. Britain’s foreign policy was ...”

“... newspapers in 1800, as if to provide a pleasant distraction from Napoleon’s centralisation of power, and then spread throughout Europe, taking on, according to Kraus, each language’s, and country’s, worst attributes. In Germany it became pedantic and moralising; in Austria-Hungary melodramatically moody and snobbishly refined. Kraus compared the ...”

“... face’. He was amazed that this brilliant man, who had seen ‘so many people defeated by age, power and success and written so convincingly about them should have fallen into the trap set by life’. In Julian Evans’s depiction of the Havana scene in Semi-Invisible Man, we begin to understand the force of Hemingway’s decline and its effect on ...”

“... were flooding into Zimbabwe and would be harshly dealt with. The Minister of Information, Jonathan Moyo, went on TV to say that such people had better be prepared to spend a very long time in Zimbabwe and we knew what he meant. Mr Moyo had several times made it clear that he regards me with particular loathing so I wasn’t too surprised to find ...”

“... artistic spirit; but not all artists have viewed their trade in this high-minded manner. Jonathan Swift or Samuel Johnson would have been dismayed by this grandiose inflation of their literary hackwork. And who knows how Aeschylus or the author of Beowulf regarded their craft? It would be rash to assume that they thought of it in the same way Shelley ...”

“... of knowledge and innovation’, with instrument makers catering to every new scientific pursuit. Jonathan Sisson’s workshop had a high reputation for mathematical instruments; John and Peter Dollond, opticians, made the first telescope to be encased in mahogany (Captain Cook always travelled with his ‘Dollond’). Thomas Twining opened a coffee house at ...”

“... provided ‘matter to feed and fertilise the mind’. London sights could ‘feed me without a power of satiating me’. Of dreams, he said that ‘we love to chew the cud of a foregone vision; to collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again, with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies.’ He savoured experience, and so ...”

“... reason: he was the one with the camera. ‘Anyone could be in that suit,’ the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones said of the picture of Aldrin. ‘It is a portrait of humanity evolving before our eyes into something new and extraordinary. It’s as if the moon’s surface has overwhelmed Aldrin’s face, or even become it.’ I’m not so sure: I see only ...”

“... like a fulfilment of prophecy, bringing closer the Second Advent and the overthrow of American power. To what extent the FBI negotiators were aware of this I do not know. Although Seventh-Day Adventist eschatology has a certain superficial similarity to that of Zoroastrianism, the deeper connections are indirect, mediated in the first instance by Paradise ...”

“... can’t be a legend, you have to be older.’ Thomson is not dealing in legend, though, but in the power of desire. Kidman isn’t just a star, or even a legend; she is a hegemon. How did she achieve the status she has now, at the top of the A-list of Hollywood actresses, and how has she kept it for so long? If you think Kidman doesn’t deserve a whole ...”

“... of mystic truth, is ultimately far more important and influential in shaping man’s fate than the power game of those with political aspirations who try to change the world directly.’ A highly debatable point of view, of course, and one with which Perutz, to judge by Is science necessary?, wouldn’t agree. While Delbrück’s non-technical writings mainly ...”