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“... execute all things. Both the word and the island of Utopia were the teasing inventions of Sir Thomas More. More’s vision of the good place which is no place may have been inspired by the voyages of Columbus’s follower Amerigo Vespucci, who explored the coast of Venezuela and, absurdly, managed to adorn with his name both of the continents of the New ...”

“... façade, and two different logos, and packages its goods with almost fetishistic attention. One brand of coffee comes in a metallic silver bag, with the following information printed down one side in varying sizes, colours and typefaces, as carefully laid-out as a magazine centrespread: ‘Northern Quarter Blend … Slack, smoky, complex, 24-7, domestic ...”

“... Thus Edward VI is shunted off in six lines, with a cross-reference to the Reformation, whereas Thomas Cromwell gets 21 lines to himself plus a separate entry under Tudor Revolution in Government. This may indicate the administrative path to editorial favour, for A.V. Dicey’s academic writings on the 19th century state are rewarded with an entry of nine ...”

“... the Glucksteins and their relations the Salmons, and the rise and fall of their commercial empire. Thomas Harding, a descendant through his mother, grew up knowing little about that side of his family; his book is an engaging blend of historical research and personal affection. The Glucksteins began as the Glücksteins in Jever near Bremen and seem always to ...”

“... that the great satires of Stalinism – Animal Farm and 1984 – which led some socialists to brand him as a turncoat would end up providing ammunition for Tories and Cold Warriors, as indeed they did. But, as Hitchens again points out, Orwell was gloomily foreseeing the Cold War when most Tories were still hailing Britain’s gallant Soviet ally. And if ...”

“... current moral intuitions as possible, and that of the ‘Liberationist’, who accepts Unger’s brand of revisionary utilitarianism, rejecting some of our moral intuitions as ill-founded. It may be doubted whether any good philosopher has ever been a Preservationist, and Unger offers no discussion of the way intuition and ordinary belief are treated by ...”

“... the front, and altogether enjoying a doughboy-to-doughboy rapport with his trench readership. Says Thomas Kunkel: ‘the paper, perhaps more than anything other than combat itself, coalesced the disparate, cobbled-together American units into an army.’ Although one of Ross’s most effective ploys on Stars and Stripes was to ‘allow the enlisted men to ...”

“... and Kennedy Inc. Aldous’s book suggests that neither assessment is satisfactory: Schlesinger’s brand of liberalism withered because its members were determined to end all cross-breeding with ideological formations to their left. These experiments had once made liberalism a flexible and capacious creed. Instead progressive liberals became spongers off their ...”

“... their booths and houses closed; and they should work honestly for their bread under the pain of a brand of the iron on their cheeks and banishment from the town.’ More than five hundred years later, sex-workers still trade in Aberdeen’s red-light district. Syphilis became less virulent as the years went by, although this had nothing to do with the efforts ...”

“... exclusivist as the Nazi state which in Eliot’s eyes helped to spell its ruin. It represented, as Thomas Mann understood, a disabling sublimation of the spirit that left actual human life perilously open to the assaults of barbarism. Moreover, though racism and anti-semitism are not essential components of right-wing Tory belief, as they are of most Fascist ...”

“... survivors, make this book an essential preface to the classic histories of New York abstraction by Thomas B. Hess, Irvine Sandler and Harold Rosenberg. The original texts from which John Russell’s book has been compiled were issued serially in 1974-5. Since then a little updating has been attempted in the manner of a whistle-stop tour of recent ...”

“... or a citizen of Haute Volta, and in 1984, a ‘Burkinabe’: the new head of state, Thomas Sankara, had combined two non-colonial languages to rename Haute Volta as Burkina Faso, ‘the land of the upright’. By then Sory’s work had consigned him to the land of the slightly stooped, gazing through the viewfinder or bent over the developing ...”

“... Thomas Babington Macaulay – later Lord Macaulay, and ‘Tom’ to Catherine Hall – was the most influential of all British historians. Sales of the first two volumes of his great History of England, published in 1848, rivalled those of Scott and Dickens. The main reason for his popularity, apart from his literary style, was that he flattered the English by crediting them with a unique history of evolving ‘freedom ...”

“... and, in its original sense, a mark impressed, engraved or otherwise made on a surface: a brand or stamp or cut. Peter Simon’s engraving of Fuseli’s ‘The Enchanted Island Before the Cell of Prospero’ for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (1797). The Compleat Drawing-Book is an example of the kind of educational artistic guide that ...”

“... state of Sarawak on Borneo as a private fiefdom in the mid-19th century, America produced its own brand of freebooters, including William Walker, the Tennessee doctor who conquered and ruled Nicaragua for ten months and decimated the population of Costa Rica.Until the end of the 19th century the US state was in no position to undertake imperial projects ...”