“... is a first-rate reservoir, always freshly stocked with ideas, with an unfaked erudition drawn from French and German sources as well as English – full of reminders, on-the run paraphrases, speculations or aperçus, which are tantalising in exact proportion to their ambiguous pertinence. His worst vices are imprecision of reference and description, a habitual ...”

“... stasis, scattering, reconstruction – is typical of many libraries from the 17th century. David Pearson’s Book Ownership in Stuart England gives us a superlative tour of just about everything we might want to know about the early modern culture of book buying, borrowing, listing, shelving, storing and displaying. The ‘backbone’ of his ...”

“... the Boches as a pleasing omen of more to come of the same sort’.By the turn of the century, as David Olusoga explained in The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire (2014), Britain had already sorted its Indian subjects into martial races (mostly hardy mountain types from the Punjab and Nepal) and effeminate races (typically people of the plateau and ...”

“... earned him the wrath of Israel’s supporters, who were particularly angry with him for quoting David Ben-Gurion as saying:Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does it matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come ...”

“... have haunted understanding of Smith between his death in 1790, during the early stages of the French Revolution, and the collapse of Communism in 1989-91. Only now can we begin to restore him to ‘the more innocent world’ of pre-1789 Europe, and to recapture the possibilities which the Revolution destroyed. In particular, Rothschild aims to ...”

“... as its midwives. It then continues, by way of Newton, Locke and (for some purposes) Hume, to the French Philosophes, reaching its end, if not its climax, in Kant. It is overwhelmingly a secular phenomenon, whose protagonists (at the least) attach little positive value to religion. In short it is the Enlightenment of traditional Ideengeschichte, as rendered ...”

“... Are counter-factuals, then, a seductive but hopeless strategy for the historical imagination? David Lewis argued in Counterfactuals (1973) that warranted counter-factuals not only had to obey causal logic, they had to imply a real alternative world, of which it seemed there must be an infinite number. Hawthorn along with earlier critics rejects this ...”

“... finish, techniques of veneering and exotic materials found in contemporary cabinets, while the French rococo frames were the work of sculptors who also carved ornamental wall-panelling, and were sometimes created by the leading designers of the luxury furnishings with which they danced in unison. However well ...”

“... of this kind’. One expects that sort of thing from Portillo, who probably thinks Lebanon is French and something to do with the European Union and therefore to be opposed. Rifkind should know better. Probably he does. Before we left London I had the impression that, with Rifkind away in Bolivia or somewhere, our attitude was being laid down not by the ...”

“... whose other barely distinguishable symptoms were marijuana, acne and the vapourisings of feckless French fumisterie. Talk of a ‘crisis’ in English studies usually misses the point. It’s more appropriate to see the English studies itself as the response to a crisis. Politics were always involved, and the pressures of industrial competition and ...”

“... can be exaggerated, faked or feigned,’ the psychologists Peter Halligan, Christopher Bass and David Oakley wrote in their introduction to a collection of essays from 2003 titled Malingering and Illness Deception. Medical professionals, researchers and even courts, they went on, were often reluctant ‘to entertain the label or to stigmatise individuals as ...”

“... I know the Monster, because I have lived in its lair – and my weapon is only the slingshot of David. Martí was the founder of the Cuban nation, the framer of Cuban identity if anyone was, and this doesn’t sound like identification with the United States. Goliath stepped in before David could level the ...”

“... pseudonym of Mohammed Moulessehoul, a former high-ranking Algerian military officer who writes in French under his wife’s name. Getting translated into English is a hurdle cleared by few novelists from the Arab and Muslim world; it helps if one writes against one of America’s enemies. In The Swallows of Kabul, Khadra writes against the ultimate enemy: the ...”

“... T.F. Henderson, dismissed this theory on the grounds that, unlike Bothwell, Darnley could not read French, but we can no longer be so sure of that. In 1965, a Newcastle doctor, M.H. Armstrong Davison, advanced the ‘other woman thesis’ – that some of the letters were written by an unknown spurned lover of Bothwell’s – which has influenced a number of ...”

“... race, as if in fee, by the Almighty?’ Our ancestors, he continues, conquered Normandy, beat the French of Maine, Anjou, Aquitaine, conquered Britain and Apulia and Calabria and Sicily, and put to flight the emperors of both East and West on the same day. What have we to fear from King David and ‘his half-naked ...”