“... before Thatcher carried the vote of no confidence in Callaghan, she had commissioned her friend Nicholas Ridley to design a campaign of revenge on the mineworkers, and to ensure that all the arsenals and all the tactical designs were in place in advance. Nigel Lawson, who was later to cover himself with glory as Energy Secretary in this bannered ...”

“... to pederasty among priests’. Two New York Times science journalists – William Broad and Nicholas Wade – were outraged at what they saw as bland indifference to the problem on the part of leaders of the scientific community, and in 1982 they published a book – Betrayers of the Truth – that alleged widespread fraud and judged science’s ...”

“... After the Fascists took over (the country and the paper), he went back to Trieste, getting by as best he could, eventually leaving for Paris in 1935 when, ‘with Mussolini’s ghastly war in Ethiopia, he could bear it no longer.’ Along with eight or nine other Italian émigrés, Weisz is on the editorial board of Liberazione, a samizdat liberal monthly ...”

“... need for funds seems to have driven Kibaki to make his alliance with Moi and his wealthy henchman Nicholas Biwott. Rewards necessarily followed. The big winner in the new cabinet is George Saitoti, who has been made minister for internal security. Although his background is in academia, Saitoti amassed a fortune while serving as a minister under President ...”

“... aesthetics, particularly as epitomised by the novels of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (Jean Paul). Nicholas Marston, writing on Schumann’s heroes Schubert, Beethoven and Bach, quotes the 19-year-old composer telling Wieck: ‘when I play Schubert, it’s as if I were reading a novel “composed” by Jean Paul.’ And in his chapter on Schumann’s ‘Novel ...”

“... Seduction: Being, An Account of the Late Proceedings . . . against the Reverend Abbée, Claudius Nicholas des Rues, for Committing Rapes upon 133 Virgins (1725), he voices anxiety ‘lest this Factum for Abbée des Rues, and the Revival of Marvell’s Works, should heap more Coals of Fire upon my Head’, and then adds defiantly that ‘as to the Principles ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”