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“... a mining engineer who had recently acquired a Holt Caterpillar Tractor with surprising powers of travelling across country. As Swinton says, ‘this knowledge lay dormant in my mind until ten weeks after the War had broken out. When it did recur to me it was as if a ray of light had struck a sensitised plate.’ In September 1914, very soon after ...”

“... literary system of facts and values is at best an illusion and at worst an imposition by the powers that be of an orthodoxy designed to suppress dissent. It is thought to be an illusion for the reason that both the form and the content of a discourse are not self-generated, but have the shape they do by virtue of relationships (of similarity and ...”

“... 11 September attacks); signs of a Saudi-Iranian rapprochement; the new assertiveness of other OPEC powers; the dismal findings of the Simmons Report, spelling out the declining yields of major Saudi oilfields – had placed in doubt the Saudi role as a reliable ‘swing producer’, which could turn the taps on or off whenever it was in America’s strategic ...”

“... he still believed in the possibility of a nuclear victory of the Soviet Union over the Imperialist powers, just as American hawks still believed that the United States could win such a war against Communism. That interview took place in July 1968 during the last weeks of the Prague Spring. The Minister assured Sakharov that the Central Committee had ruled out ...”

“... and prose in a 45-page anthology which has just been published. Meanwhile Mr Patten, who has no powers to control university entrance, has urged vice-chancellors to stop admitting students whose spelling and grammar are not up to scratch. Lady Blatch, a junior education minister, has called on school examining boards to exclude television programmes from ...”

“... of access to a civilised society. Here, selected almost at random, is a single example of his powers, taken from Education and the University (1943). He is discussing these lines from Lady Macbeth’s welcome to Duncan:                              All our service In every point twice done, and then done double Were poor and ...”

“... of Serbia clashed with a new sense of national identity among Albanians. In 1912 the Great Powers agreed to the creation of an Albanian state but allowed Serbia and Montenegro to incorporate Kosovo. For Serbs this was a liberation from Turkish rule; for the majority Albanians – who today make up 90 per cent of the province’s population – it was ...”

“... which had disgraced the British name’.Harrison and others, including his tutor, the Positivist Richard Congreve, sought to disrupt what Burke had called the ‘geographic morality’ that warped people’s capacity to sympathise with the fate of colonial subjects. ‘Open any map of the world,’ Congreve wrote in response to the Sepoy Mutiny, ‘and see ...”

“... wrote in one of his essays for Bute. In particular, he had a clear understanding of the balance of powers, ‘where one part of the legislative body checks the other by the privilege of rejecting, both checked by the executive, as that is again by the legislative; all parts moving, and however they may follow the particular interests of their body, yet all ...”

“... there in 1878. She went to seek respite from her passionate but unconsummated love affair with Richard Doughty-Wylie (nephew of the great explorer Charles Doughty), whom she had met when he was British Consul in Konya. Doughty-Wylie was married, and was not prepared to risk his career by leaving his wife. A man with physical courage to match ...”

“... stuck to the party line of perceiving the war as a necessary and welcome clash between imperialist powers: as communists linked with Moscow, the Partisans had to look on Germany as a nominal non-aggressor as long as the Nazi-Soviet Pact held. It was only when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 that their position became free of ambiguity. But by then they ...”

“... life. He became the bosom companion (and, later, biographer) of the squalid and glamorous poet Richard Savage. At night, ‘in high spirits and brimful of patriotism’, they walked the streets together, denouncing ministerial corruption and vowing to stand by their country. Savage’s licentiousness, Boswell reported, may have led his protégé ‘into ...”

“... play of the early 1580s about an exiled courtier who lives in a cave and exercises magical powers derived from his books. The plots of the late plays revert nakedly towards fairy tale, in ways Ben Jonson, for one, found embarrassing: in 1614, in the induction to Bartholomew Fair, Jonson promised that his play would not include a ...”

“... ever have occurred to us, had we not learned them from TV? Some years ago, I met the photographer Richard Avedon when he came to take a group portrait of some Scottish writers in a Glasgow bar. By chance, I had recently been to see his retrospective exhibition, Evidence, at the National Portrait Gallery, and had become almost obsessed by the series of ...”

“... with charm) is particularly striking. Johnston ticks off ‘undergraduate atheists’ like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who have doubtless noticed this correlation, and scolds them for their errors about Spinoza, but I find Dawkins and Hitchens (and Sam Harris) companionable, as I find Johnston himself, and feel no resultant ...”