“... Nativity) but in the High Renaissance ‘magus’ came to mean a worker of occult marvels, using powers that in Simon’s case had turned out to be demonic. Magic also seemed unnecessary to some commentators, who exalted human-wrought wonders such as shipbuilding, navigation, land reclamation, explosives, cryptography and mechanical automata – a tradition ...”

“... In Pushkin’s introduction to Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, which is included in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new translation of Pushkin’s prose, a friend of the deceased (fictional) writer, a neighbouring squire, says that after his death Belkin’s housekeeper ‘sealed all of her cottage windows with the first part of a ...”

“... the nature of most of the techniques used (‘stealth methods’, so called); second, the choking powers of secrecy available to our government; and third, the haphazard way in which information about these matters emerges, when it emerges at all, which hampers our ability to ask the most basic questions. We are now in the endgame of a cycle that started in ...”

“... power. Although its military power is daunting, America’s political, economic and ideological powers are much more modest. Such discriminations are important because military power is not especially useful for achieving many of the US’s most important goals. This is true even in the realm of national security. The principal security threats identified ...”

“... name and was meant to consign the sectarian convulsions of the decade to the past. In 1659, under Richard Cromwell, Marvell obtained his parliamentary seat as a court nominee sent from Whitehall to defeat a powerful republican candidate. When the Parliament met he savoured the defeat of the republicans and of their ‘maxim’ that ‘all power is in the ...”

“... by Waterhouse’s concern with the pedigrees of the painters he discussed, men like Thomas Jones, Richard Wilson and Sawrey Gilpin, all of whom are adjudged to be of ‘good family’, and Sir James Thornhill, who came from ‘good Dorset stock’, a phrase more at home in a book on country cooking than in a serious work of scholarship. Why pedigree mattered ...”

“... the Upper East Side. His son Jared, an art student specialising in industrial sculpture (the next Richard Serra, even), started to make it his home. Young Jared took pleasure in the neighbourhood, dirty and dangerous as it was, with homeless people and intravenous drug users camping out in Tompkins Square Park, and was surprised when a contingent of ...”

“... is evident that some of the energy of the writing springs from a desire to show up those wrongful powers (placid companies, exclusive civic corporations, Anglican clerics, rich and idle gentles and the idle poor) who impede the work of others. He is, however, respectful of the work of the labouring poor, and here, too, the modern editors do not accompany him ...”

“... iconography of Gustave Moreau, who died of old age before the century was out. D’Annunzio and Richard Strauss shamelessly employed Symbolist props and decor that had grown tatty with fifty years of constant use. But with Brennan the trappings were the inspiration. His nominal subject – the nominal subject never really nominated – was merely the ...”

“... it was the Democratic coterie that had elevated him which rallied round. The campaign was led by Richard Holbrooke, imposing the changes in Annan’s entourage that were deemed necessary to save him. In fact, what is really striking about Annan’s tenure as secretary-general is less his personal characteristics than the nature of the inner circle that ...”

“... They are people we cannot help treating, at one level, as entities with wishes, fears, awareness, powers over us, subservience to us. We still desire their presence – their regard. And therefore we resent their failure to give it, or dream a reciprocity still lingering on. But corpses (for the hunter-gatherer mind in all of us, which goes into overdrive at ...”

“... lower-class Indian – Merchant himself was convinced that this was ‘a matter of record’: Sir Richard Burton ‘had done exactly that again and again’. Merchant was educated at St Xavier’s College in Bombay before leaving for the US in 1958, and was clearly not so sceptical about colonialist claims of conducting a mission civilisatrice in the way that ...”

“... the war as the ‘strongest nation in the air’, Britain now lagged far behind the other major powers. London, the Evening News maintained, was virtually defenceless. So began that year’s bombing panic. The paper’s proprietor, Lord Rothermere, had begun to campaign for aerial rearmament. At the end of January, he announced the formation of a new ...”

“... whom it had previously offered asylum. By 1793, with France at war against a coalition of European powers, non-French nationals were hounded, imprisoned and expelled. In the spring of 1794 Robespierre stormed into the Convention and denounced Cloots for his links to the Vandenyver banking family, who were accused of distributing British gold in France. ‘Can ...”

“... Lewes wrote, ‘one of that class whose unwritten poems, undemonstrated discoveries, or untested powers, are confidently announced as certain to carry everything before them, when they appear. Only they never do appear.’ Clough’s premature demise seemed in keeping with this general impression of hopelessness. ‘I cannot say his death took me altogether ...”