“... plantation owners and their slaves, called casa grande e senzala; sometimes the children of the masters and those of the servants can be found spinning tops or flying kites together. Servants are naturally a favourite topic of conversation. ‘They are so difficult to get and so hard to keep.’ ‘They don’t know their station any more.’ ‘It’s not ...”

“... incidents he prefers to gloss over. Ferguson had a share in the horse with the Irish businessman John Magnier, a very wealthy man whose interests (in conjunction with his associate J.P. McManus) ranged from stud farms to currency trading. What started out as a bit of fun turned deadly serious once Rock of Gibraltar began winning race after race, making him ...”

“... and fumes from coal (‘sea-coal’) burned in breweries, bakeries and glass foundries. John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, or, the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated (1661) dismissed the idea that domestic hearths had much to do with it – probably correctly at the time.Evelyn wrote about ‘Clowds of Smoak and Sulphur, so full of ...”

“... Western allies remains to be seen. There has been extensive damage already. The Saudis are past masters in destroying places of importance to early Islamic history. The royal family’s adherence to the sectarian Wahhabi doctrine led them to order the destruction of the tombs of Muhammad’s family and some of his closest followers in Medina.The importance ...”

“... ardent champion of the northern schools of painting and put Bonheur alongside Dutch 17th-century masters like Paulus Potter (dubbed, apparently without irony, ‘the Raphael of cows’). At the Salon held in the revolutionary conditions of 1848, her composition of Cantal bulls scooped first prize. This success seemed to confirm Thoré’s most daring, and ...”

“... under Michael Foster but never mentions Adrian, Hodgkin or Huxley, all Nobel Laureates and masters of Trinity, who immediately after the war worked in the most prestigious biological department which pullulated with FRS. The greatest change in social life? Brooke is in no doubt. Women. He writes with generosity about the establishment of the women’s ...”

“... social life. The major single piece of progress has consisted in a documentary discovery made by John Shearman and Webster Smith. They showed that the painting originally hung not in the villa of Castello, which belonged after 1477 or 1478 to Lorenzo’s cousin, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, but in Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco’s city house – a ...”

“... First: ‘The narrative of Robinson Crusoe is the account of how a single man gradually masters his own compulsions and extends his control over a huge, indifferent, even potentially hostile environment, learning to harness its inhuman forces and to put them to use for his own benefit. In this process, which is essentially that of rationalising the ...”

“... The system of ‘apprenticeship’, which bound freed men and women to work for their masters for a further period, was abolished in 1838, when ‘full freedom’ was granted after further campaigns in both metropole and colony. But it wasn’t full freedom at all. In the following decades, the emancipated struggled to enjoy the rights that had ...”

“... pain’, though he adds that, if it is true that ‘classical utilitarians like Bentham and John Stuart Mill used “pleasure” ... to include achieving what one desired’ and vice versa, then ‘the difference between classical utilitarianism and utilitarianism based on interests disappears.’ In fact, achieving what one desires is not always ...”

“... was referring to the ‘Quarterly Journal of Socialist Humanism’ launched by E.P. Thompson and John Saville in 1957 as a forum for what they called ‘Britain’s largest unorganised party – the ex-communist party’. The New Reasoner ran to ten issues before being absorbed into the fledgling New Left Review, and it included a memorable essay by ...”

“... book, in the way that he isin Richard Holmes’s recent, sensitive profile in the Oxford ‘Past Masters’ series. Does a study like Levere’s miss some point, or is one merely making an obvious remark about the difference between ‘biography’ and ‘intellectual history’? Authors and critics with Romantic sympathies – or even hostilities – have a ...”

“... fervour also seems to me to come into play in the contrast between his distaste for John Ford and his love of Howard Hawks, perhaps the perfect no-brow. The clue to Hawks’s greatness is that this sombre lining is cut against the cloth of the genre in which he is operating. Far from the meek purveyor of Hollywood forms, he always chose to turn ...”

“... it had long been upheld, in the courts. Beardsley’s legacy does not run through the acknowledged masters of Modernism, but through a tradition of alternative modernity which sustained many of the values (or counter-values) of Decadence. Arguably, his influence was stronger in literature than in visual art – we can trace it explicitly, as Stanley Weintraub ...”

“... number of ‘leaks’ that had been traced to them, by the same constraints that their gentlemanly masters had always accepted instinctively. It has not invariably worked. Non-gentlemen still cannot be trusted. Most secret service whistleblowers, for example, have been grammar school oiks, like Peter Wright (Bishop’s Stortford High School) and, more ...”