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“... recapture some of their former splendour? Such thoughts were very much in my mind while reading Robert Garland’s retelling of Athens’s tribulations during those two fraught years of Persian invasion. It is a story that has been told countless times, but never before has the narrative concentrated primarily on the Athenians’ wholesale evacuation of ...”

“... and for the first few years of its existence the CRS was widely seen as a ‘police force in the service of the people’. This image did not survive for long (the force was purged of communist members after 1947), but illustrated the party’s dedication to the reconstruction of the state. The emblem of state resurgence in the postwar years was the policy ...”

“... Baby rats. Thrashy rats. Ugly, dirty scratchy rats. Funny, jumpy cute rats.’ And then there is Robert Sullivan’s delightful and revolting Rats, the most exhaustive, nauseating and pleasurable compendium of rat facts ever set down. Facts such as: wherever there are human beings, there are rats. China is where the rat originated, and where you can find it ...”

“... Victoria in 1897. The thumping Unionist electoral triumph of 1895 was confidently ascribed by Sir Robert Ensor (who had been a Winchester schoolboy at the time) to an upsurge of expansionist imperialism, while A.G. Gardiner, the biographer of Sir William Harcourt, spoke of ‘a tidal wave of Jingoism’, as ‘the arrogant nationalism of Mr Kipling and the ...”

“... society exists to serve the economy, and not the other way around. True, the Secretary of Labour Robert Reich and other members of the Clinton Administration have rather suddenly taken to criticising the mass firings on the part of major corporations in general and of AT & T in particular (40,000 initially budgeted for, later reduced to 18,000). But at the ...”

“... halfpenny.’ The directors of the London Telephone Company were hoping to provide a similar service. The term ‘kiosk’ drew at once on a faint association with the Turkish pavilion or summerhouse, and more palpably on the familiar stands selling newspapers, or tea and buns. ‘Today,’ the Daily News trumpeted on 1 April 1891, ‘the new Telephone ...”

“... Hump’ as Bloomsberries called her, was 11 years older than Julia. The astonishing success of Robert Elsmere (1888) made her the second most famous woman in Victorian England. Her poignant saga of a young Anglican priest who defects from the Church to rediscover God in the slums of London sold by the hundred thousand in Britain. In America, unprotected by ...”

“... should have been largely eclipsed. For biographers wishing to pay only lip-service to his seeming idiosyncrasy, Faraday himself conveniently provided an excuse. Addressing Ada, Countess of Lovelace, in October 1844, he remarked that ‘I do not think it at all necessary to tie the study of the natural sciences and religion ...”

“... on and on. Relentless and opinionated, Wilson by that time had fallen foul of the Internal Revenue Service, which, because he hadn’t filed returns for several years, had impounded his earnings and possessions, actual as well as potential. He had already begun to regale his readers with all sorts of personal writings, the most annoying of which to me was the ...”

“... certificate, on which her father claimed Durban as his birthplace, and a journalist called Robert Greer as his father. She sought his traces in the usual formal registers of Tasmania, where he had grown up, Victoria and South Africa. She pursued the Greers of the world backward through Griers, Griersons, Gregors and Macgregors to the kith of Scottish ...”

“... its farms and its grain and commodity exchanges, has receded in importance as the financial and service centres, in New York and California, rise and fall with Gatsby-like flair. Those frightening actualities of foreign provenance – trade deficits, Aids, terrorism, Soviet evil, immigrants – have recently overtaken the society as a whole, reduced its ...”

“... up the greater part of the Italian establishment; amongst its members were the military and secret service hierarchies, the leaders of the judiciary, the police, the civil service, as well as prominent politicians and industrialists. There was a direct link between P-2 and Calvi, and it was clear that the affairs of the ...”

“... day that the election was called, Hayden was the Labor leader. He was dumped after years of loyal service on the grounds that he was uninspiring whereas Hawke, although he had been an MP for only three years, was a born vote-getter. Hawke’s rise has been phenomenal. Before he became an MP, with his hooded eyes firmly fixed on the Prime Minister’s job, he ...”

“... I haven’t found anybody interesting yet. There are not many young people and the small ‘Robert’ (who calls himself ‘Wob’) doesn’t mind accepting a box of bricks (bought at the barber’s) from me but he doesn’t want me to help to play with ’em. I tried yesterday. ‘Wob’ stood it as long as he could. Then he screwed up his face, and ...”

“... Courtesy, gentleness, honour, physical valour, mercifulness, generosity, sexual purity, devoted service to women, consideration for the oppressed – mortal man could scarcely accommodate more virtues than these. Although Burke, in his famous lament over Marie Antoinette, had declared, ‘The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and ...”