“... back in Athens whenever foreign invaders or disaffected elites tried to snuff it out. It also means that democratic institutions showed verve and drive in trying to find practical solutions to technical problems that threatened to overwhelm the state. Like the most durable football teams, Athenian democracy did everything it could to prevent a run of bad ...”

“... presumptuously – readable. Unlike the poems, they were not digressions. They represented the means by which Kipling hoped to establish himself in society: not as an irritant, but as a reliable witness and a shaper of opinion. They will, as Professor Pinney suggests, change our view of his early career. In his autobiography, Something of Myself, Kipling ...”

“... retired at the end of the 1955-6 year, Bloch was now isolated from student life, though by no means disgraced. He retained a second academic post, and in 1959 Aufbau published the first volume of Das Prinzip Hoffnung. By then he had already secured an alternative publishing outlet in the West, thanks to the links with the Suhrkamp Verlag in Frankfurt ...”

“... Napoleana and tiger skins – set about appropriating the country’s wealth by more sophisticated means. The Pahlevi Foundation was set up in 1958, ostensibly for charitable purposes. ‘By 1979 its assets were estimated at around $3 billion. Between them the Royal Family and the Pahlevi Foundation were thought to control 80 per cent of the cement industry in ...”

“... In David Grossman’s 1998 novel, Be My Knife, an antiquarian book-dealer starts a passionate correspondence with a woman whom he has barely caught sight of across a room. The unlikely circumstances of their relationship, its unusual fusion of intimacy and distance, allow them to say, or rather write, things which neither of them has ever admitted before ...”

“... about the physical signs of subjective states, but they also remind us that ‘character’ means both personality, and, in its original sense, a mark impressed, engraved or otherwise made on a surface: a brand or stamp or cut. Peter Simon’s engraving of Fuseli’s ‘The Enchanted Island Before the Cell of Prospero’ for Boydell’s Shakespeare ...”

“... most effectively be raised by moving as quickly as possible to capital-intensive mass production. David Hume’s alternative, to think in terms of a ‘product cycle’, of simple agriculture at one end and advanced manufacture at the other, and to position oneself at the point at which one could make the most of one’s endowments and of trade with other ...”

“... mother is said to have predicted, would be ‘a thorn in Charles’s side as long as he lives’. David Hume, encountering Fox at 16 during one of his formative visits to Paris, was startled by his intellectual power and maturity and already foresaw him as ‘a very great acquisition to the publick’, if the lure of a life of cosmopolitan ...”

“... of the Zionist movement realised that they could not achieve their aim without inducing, by one means or another, a large number of Arabs to leave Palestine. In their public utterances the Zionist leaders avoided as far as possible any mention of transfer, but in private discussions they could be brutally frank. So it is from private rather than public ...”

“... professional historians may dispute the fact, have to have a point in the present, and it is by no means clear what this point, for the Social Democrats, should be In 1981 and 82, in the first flush of success, it might have seemed that it was to explain the beginning of the breaking of the misnamed mould. But in 1984, although there is no certain sign that ...”

“... was not at all opposed to the censorship of his time. ‘Let us have a strict censorship by all means, but not a senseless one,’ he writes to a friend, as if strictness (strogost) were a cosy and reassuring fact of Russian life, as it might be in England village cricket or well-rolled umbrellas. How else explain the perverse logic of the business, on the ...”

“... truthful, exempt from any compromising association with white privilege – is to be seen as one means by which that hegemony has been ratified and maintained. The range, vividness and significance of this work are well represented in Arthur Little’s collection White People in Shakespeare, a book whose ideas have only been sharpened by the fact that there ...”

“... he told the Whitehall Conference that since the Bible contained ‘a promise of their conversion, means must be used to that end, which was the preaching of the Gospel, and that could not be had unless they were permitted to reside where the Gospel was preached.’ Yet if the opposition which surfaced at the conference dissuaded the government from ...”

“... is super,’ the T-shirts used to say. The new version is ‘Zimbabwe is kenge,’ which means roughly the same thing. David Caute’s portrait of white mores is savage, but like so many visitors before and after him, he was fascinated – seduced – by Rhodesia. It was, and is, a country which captivates even as ...”

“... is a proof of the regard of God for the happiness of mankind,’ says Johnson,‘that the means by which it must be attained, are obvious and evident.’ Samuel Clarke (1675-1729), whose views Johnson often accepted, said it was as absurd to mistake plain right and wrong as it would be ‘for a man in arithmetical matters, ignorantly to believe that ...”