“... Policymakers will tend to accommodate those who care about the issue, even if their numbers are small, confident that the rest of the population will not penalise them for doing so. In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers’ unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about ...”

“... at the edges. The face is sharp and pale, the gaze challenging, the nose prominent, the mouth small, the lips bright red. In her left hand she holds a small book – probably a prayer book. She is a very stylish widow, if not a merry one. It is no great surprise to find the soi-disant countess taking arms against the ...”

“... monopoly of Scottish representation in the House of Commons and most opinion polls indicate a small majority in favour of Scottish independence. The impact of this on the crisis of Labourism, old and new, should not be underestimated. It is the most dramatic change in the UK party system since the foundation of the Labour Party itself. Add to this the ...”

“... of the Journal of Botany’, Swartz posted a few tweets about the case. The lead prosecutor, Stephen Heymann, described this as a ‘wild internet campaign’ that moved the case ‘to an institutional level’. In November 2011, nine more felony counts were added. There were several rounds of plea negotiations: the jail time on offer in exchange for a ...”

“... 31-year-old Neapolitan woman called Tiziana Cantone sent video footage of herself having sex to a small group of friends. Someone posted the footage online, and it rapidly went viral. A phrase she spoke to an unidentified partner in one of the films – ‘You’re making a video? Good’ – became a favourite punchline on social media; it was printed on ...”

“... how the text should read. The radical and impressive Oxford Classical Texts edition of 2007 by Stephen Heyworth, on which Patrick Worsnip bases his new translation, is bedecked with dots, crosses in circles, lacunae, and brackets both square and pointy. Textual notes rise up the page as a great wave of scholars – Lachmann, Housman, Heinsius, Scaliger ...”

“... deals with them as a function of paranoia. The title of its first Book (also an epigraph to Stephen King’s The Shining, an evident and superior precursor) alludes to Goya’s warning that ‘the sleep of reason breeds monsters’: the premise of a genre which knows the dangers of the Unseen. Martin Gregory is an unreliable narrator of the unhappiest ...”

“... his siblings, had been set up on marriage by his father with a piece of property of his own and a small amount of capital. Raising a mortgage on the property, he then plunged into business; in two years it had folded, the mortgage was foreclosed, and David Eisenhower never tried his hand again. Rescued by his family, he was able to raise six sons in the ...”

“... professors and jurists, not just on the hard right (Richard Posner) but also on the squishy left (Stephen Breyer), who made economic efficiency the measure of all things and provided much of the rationale for deregulation; the second wave of free-market economists (Robert Lucas, for example, or Gary Becker), who took apart the field of macroeconomics in ...”

“... class displaced and the consequent disarray of lesser Protestant families in their orbit: ‘the small world of the little big men of the provinces’. Beginning in the 19th century, Irish landed estates were sold off and Protestant political privileges dismantled, a process much accelerated in the 1920s by the War of Independence and subsequent civil ...”

“... life of their own. Ariès points out how Medieval artists portrayed the young Jesus as a small adult: they did not know how to illustrate childhood in any other way. From the studies so far published, it seems that only in the late 18th century did childhood come to seem important in itself; for some, it became an ideal upon which to model the adult ...”

“... chemistry you missed. It’s the people cringing from their scientific illiteracy who buy Stephen Hawking books they can’t read, as if having them on the shelf will make the knowledge rub off; they snap up tracts on atheism, too, to show that if they’re ignorant they’re at least rational. But still, our understanding of the mechanisms of the ...”

“... second that he was an engineer. The Viennese background, brilliantly documented by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin in Wittgenstein’s Vienna, alerts us to the linguistic and moral preoccupations that Wittgenstein shared with others of his generation before ever coming into the orbit of Frege and Russell. And the physics and engineering provide the key to the ...”

“... narrative. Drawing on elements as disparate as Alexander Afanasev’s Russian Fairy Tales and Stephen Hecht’s scholarly paper ‘Tobacco Carcinogens, Their Biomarkers and Tobacco-Induced Cancer’, Red Plenty is a seamless pastiche. It takes the long view of Soviet history, although Spufford’s view is highly selective. Sputniks and cosmonauts go ...”

“... a personal friendship which lasted some twenty-two years. But all in all these elements make up a small proportion of the whole, and they depend on the fortuitous availability of material. They cannot be said to construct the dimension of ‘social reality’ that would have provided Russo with the test case for which he had apparently hoped. Here he had bad ...”