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“... of thought is that although understanding is always of objects under a description, the causal powers of objects to hurt or help us are unaffected by the way they are described. We shall get sick and die, no matter how we describe disease and death. The Christian Scientists are, alas, wrong. The weak point of scientism is the inference from the fact that a ...”

“... to practise a little reciprocity. They have their troubles and we have ours.’ The contracting powers at the Geneva Conference accordingly agreed in 1925 to prohibit the import and export of Indian hemp except for certified medical or scientific purposes. In Britain, cannabis was immediately rescheduled as a poison, with effect from April 1925. A few ...”

“... any acquired skill, with mere talent, schooling, even with family nurturing. The small boy’s powers of ‘conversion’ or ‘turning’ or troping were instinctive even before he could speak. As far back as he can now remember, whatever the child looked at might look back, with ‘gleams’, as he likes to call them, or ‘glimmers’, shadowed ...”

“... The story of the making of the atomic bomb has been told countless times before, most notably by Richard Rhodes, but Baggott’s book is rare in giving details not just of the successful Anglo-Canadian-American effort at Los Alamos, but the competing efforts in Germany, Japan and the USSR, culminating with the explosion of Joe-1 (the first Soviet bomb) in ...”

“... to the growing professionalisation, size and political influence of the armed forces of the great powers; the militaristic nationalism of the Twenties and Thirties he ascribes additionally to the Freikorps spirit of the disgruntled and brutalised veterans of the trenches. But he places the blame for the war firmly on Hitler, over the long march from crisis to ...”

“... issue because the Allies’ failure to exploit their superiority made it certain that the Western powers would not get to Berlin before the Russians, which by this point was seeming like a political necessity, and certain that hundreds of thousands more soldiers and civilians would die before the war could be won. The roots of the lengthy withdrawal across ...”

“... and, in West Germany, found their way back into society and even political life as the Allied powers eased sanctions, fearing that the communists who ruled in the former Soviet zone of occupation – from 1949 the GDR – would successfully win their allegiance. (In East Germany’s sham multi-party system there was even a political party for ...”

“... at Cranbrook. In 1941, with a loan from Saarinen, the Eameses moved to California into a flat by Richard Neutra, where they began experimenting with moulded plywood and set up the Plyformed Wood Company. Among their first clients was the US navy, for which they designed wooden splints for injured servicemen. These were organic forms that worked with the ...”

“... spirit left to be broken. All this we should have known long ago. Think of the career of the great Richard Topcliffe, chief ‘poursuivant’ or persecutor of Jesuit missionaries in the reign of Elizabeth I. Topcliffe is perhaps not much spoken of except by historians of the Catholic martyrs or close students of Donne, who mentioned him in passing but deleted ...”

“... Richard Cobden is not a man for all seasons, but his life, career and values have been interpreted in widely different ways at different times. When he died in 1865, he was mourned by many as a secular saint. The majority remembered his leadership of one of the most triumphantly successful pressure groups in British history, the Anti-Corn Law League; and a minority honoured his uncompromising and frequently unpopular opposition to war: ‘seldom has hero rested, stained by so superb a fault ...”

“... when others are trying to prevent them from realising them’. The pursuit of power was not, as Richard Evans seems to suggest in his introduction, a distinctive feature of 19th-century Europe. What changes over time is not the fact that people seek power, but the means by which they do it, as well as the nature of the contest with those who resist them. In ...”

“... Abraham Lincoln responded to the crisis of the Civil War in the 1860s. Both Presidents assumed powers that went well beyond what the Constitution seems to allow. In both cases, thousands of people suspected of assisting the enemy were arrested and held without charge, and military tribunals were established to circumvent civilian courts. Both Lincoln and ...”

“... years, but nothing to compare with what happened in response to 9/11. According to the jurist Richard Falk, September 11 saw a terrible departure from the norm that prevailed in the aftermath of the Second World War, when, so it was said, the right to make war – the jus ad bellum – came under strict legal control: World War Two ended with the ...”

“... To return to all that. Alas, this spirited gesture merely revealed the impotence of age, the powers irrevocably lost to the killer progeny. The son’s book was a runaway success, the father’s remaindered. Not many famous writers can be read in terms of their immediate ancestry: Graves is an exception. Powerful wires were in some way crossed or the ...”

“... On the evening of 10 March 1969, Richard Crossman, Harold Wilson’s new Secretary of State for Social Services (‘SSSS? Impossible!’ Crossman wrote in his diary), reached into one of his three ministerial red boxes to find a long report by a still rather obscure Conservative barrister. Geoffrey Howe had entered Parliament in 1964, only to lose his seat when Wilson increased Labour’s majority from four to 95 in 1966 ...”