“... and designer Hans Schmoller. Yet from the beginning Pevsner had a nose for the English specialists best able to help him. Cultivated clergymen, cataloguers of dovecots, the devoted biographers of local architects and minor stained-glass artists populate the acknowledgments, from R.W. Wailes, expert on the windmills of Nottinghamshire in 1951, to Rosemary ...”

“... had displaced horses. It was unhelpful at the time that quantitative economic historians such as Nicholas Crafts were debunking simplistic stories of the industrial revolution. But such subtleties were ignored in favour of the fables spun by future Nobel Prize winners such as the economist William Nordhaus, who insisted that economic growth should not be ...”

“... alternative to Sikorsky, they agreed, should be put together, and the Government should do its best to encourage it. Heseltine was out of the country in early November, but when he returned he set his mind to the task. On 26 November, he met Sir John Cuckney, who from the outset was anxious to proceed with the Sikorsky take-over, and told him he was ...”

“... Twentieth-century Huxleys have received less biography than one might have expected. Nicholas Murray usefully fills a gap between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws ...”

“... of Philby’s funeral in Moscow:In London, Philby’s old comrade from the days of War Station XB, Nicholas Elliott, was in his club at St James’s at about this time, giving thought to a scheme to disrupt any attempt by the KGB leadership to iconise Philby posthumously, as indeed was their intention. The idea that formed in Elliott’s mind was that the ...”

“... the questions on race relations were especially insistent. After some forty minutes of doing my best as a striving white liberal, I turned the tables and asked the students about Gypsies – whom only one girl in the whole class could tell me of, because she was one. Political leaders, however, don’t generally talk to students, and never discover the ...”

“... Moore a week earlier. First, that paper was on quite a different subject, ‘Do we love ourselves best?’: so Levy’s inability to find anything in it corresponding to the claim Russell attacks is beside the point. And, second, Russell explicitly says (in a passage that Levy actually quotes) that he is addressing the content of Moore’s lectures in ...”

“... skill with Leibniz, the astronomers Johannes Hevelius and John Flamsteed, the cartographer Nicholas Mercator and, most disastrously, with Newton, who, Hooke claimed, had plagiarised from him the inverse-square law of gravitation. If you crossed Hooke’s interests, you were in for some of the ripest abuse going: his enemies were, variously, ‘ignorant ...”

“... too, praised the work of Titian while castigating the ‘bad colours’ Lotto had used in his St Nicholas altarpiece for the church of Santa Maria del Carmine. So, for three centuries after his death, Lotto was the painter who wasn’t Titian, the Venetian who hadn’t stayed in Venice. His work was peculiar, imperfect, damaged by his personality and by the ...”

“... chimney, funneling the flames’. ‘Great crowds gathered to see the spectacle,’ according to Nicholas Fogg in his history of Stratford: ‘At four o’clock in the afternoon the roof fell in, and by the following morning the building was a blackened shell.’Afterwards a telegram arrived from George Bernard Shaw: ‘You must be ...”

“... on the left, unshackled from Cold War groupthink: Asli Bâli, Aziz Rana, Jeanne Morefield, Nicholas Mulder, Christy Thornton, Daniel Bessner, Stephen Wertheim, Samuel Moyn et al. Their views share a sense of the incapacity of US force to achieve the lofty objectives invested in it, and their prescriptions range from an immediate moratorium on military ...”

“... Children, wrote to Enid Blyton to ask whether she would be willing to be interviewed about the best holiday she could remember. ‘Dear Mr Gamlin,’ Blyton wrote the next day. ‘Thank you for your nice letter. It all sounds very interesting but I ought to warn you of something you obviously don’t know, but which has been well known in the literary and ...”

“... It is a small world in which there is no alternative to nationalism. Deane would reply that the best alternative is republicanism, but it is harder to split Irish republicanism from nationalism than it is to believe (as only an Irishman would) in the existence of ‘British nationalism’. The constitutional and cultural muddle of English, Welsh, Scottish ...”

“... the physical evidence of this overturning of the ‘natural’ order of things. Traditionally the best-provided Soviet city, it became one of the worst as farmers and suppliers consumed in their regions produce once ordered to be sent to the capital. The budget deficit now began to grow and grow. Less than 3 per cent of the GNP in 1986, it had jumped to 11 ...”

“... towards GPs, who must inevitably take a wider view of the health needs of their community. As Nicholas Timmins puts it in The Five Giants (1996), we now saw hospital ‘consultants sending GPs Christmas cards, not the other way around’. Second, Thatcher’s Health of the Nation plans, with targets set for cutting diseases such as breast cancer and heart ...”