“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for whom the terse passion of ancient Hebrew poetry (Job and Psalms especially) had expressive powers unmatched by the regulated, decorous traditions of classical verse. Generous illustrations from the 14th-century poet Hāfiz decorated the work that made Jones’s name, A Grammar of the Persian Language (1771), in which he whimsically styled himself ...”

“... dismissed (which is pretty much Norman Lamont’s career in a nutshell). Later in the century, Richard FitzNeal, first as dean of Lincoln and latterly as bishop of London, continued in his day job in the church while moonlighting as treasurer ” for an apparently unbroken forty years. It’s as though Jim Callaghan were now preparing to leave 11 Downing ...”

“... at this election by Liberal-National success in the more proportional Senate. With its blocking powers, the second chamber has in the past often limited the actions of the House of Representatives – but will not do so between 2004 and 2007. Take the Greens: in spite of their healthy first-preference vote, the widespread popularity of their Tasmanian ...”

“... the dullness of that church to John Oldrid Scott must be resisted, Stamp thinks. Perhaps Scott’s powers were just waning. In some ways his case compares with those of John Clare, also confined at Northampton, and Richard Dadd, who both managed to be creative under lock and key. But architecture, a more businesslike pursuit ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... were those relating to the provision of refuges for state agents and to the exercise of emergency powers. For the housing of central government, a huge bunker was constructed inside an underground wartime aircraft factory in the West Country. It could house four thousand people and was equipped with offices, dormitories, a laundry, canteen, medical ...”

“... Gnostic tradition, which maintained that Eve used her reflection to protect herself when the evil powers tried to rape her; they fell for the reflection, while Eve herself escaped. In other Gnostic texts, it is Adam who loses his celestial nature as a result of falling in love with his own image glimpsed in the mirror of water. (These myths may be derived ...”

“... representative democracies complete with civil rights, elected parliaments, separation of powers, alternation of governments. Under the benevolent but watchful eye of the Commission, seeing to it that criteria laid down at the Copenhagen Summit of 1993 were properly met, Eastern Europe has been shepherded into the comity of free nations. There was no ...”

“... the best opportunity to end the nuclear arms race we have ever had. The two leading nuclear powers agreed on every detail required for complete disarmament, except one.Watching Reagan deploy fictions so unselfconsciously that they became truths to himself as well as to his audience, we begin to glimpse the epistemological significance of his ...”

“... bulldog’, the Oxford emeritus professor for the public understanding of science, Richard Dawkins, has been called his unmuzzled rottweiler; according to Dawkins, Darwin’s idea wasn’t just a great one (‘the most powerful, revolutionary idea ever put forward by an individual’), it is essentially the only idea you need to explain life ...”

“... Company struck again. This time the book was called Innovation and written by a director called Richard Foster. With ‘change’ all around them, successful companies need to know more about innovation and the problem of limits. Here, then, is the story of the S-curve, the theory of the Attacker’s Advantage, and a necessary correction of Peters and ...”

“... the victor, have ended in the anticipation of a third world war between the two remaining world powers. This moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died. We no longer hope for an eventual restoration of the old world order with all its traditions, or for the reintegration of the masses of five continents who have been ...”

“... understood the way national security blurs the line between the possible and the actual than Richard Perle. ‘How far Saddam’s gone on the nuclear weapons side I don’t think we really know,’ Perle said on one occasion. ‘My guess is it’s further than we think. It’s always further than we think, because we limit ourselves, as we think about ...”