“... at the dark brown sandstone of the Renfrew Street front, really made of the building. Glasgow may be on the pilgrimage route along with Barcelona, Budapest, Nancy, Moscow and Riga, those cities in which strikingly original buildings from the years around 1900 can be found, whether Art Nouveau, Jugendstil or Modernismo, but the GSA building is not wildly ...”

“... foreign espionage that is at present taking place within this country and the danger to which it may expose us’. The subcommittee was rapidly persuaded of the spy menace, and on its recommendation the Secret Service Bureau, the forerunner of both MI5 (the Security Service) and MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service), was established in October ...”

“... unprecedented and wonderful (the Louvre’s is the version copyists soon fastened on), and it may well be that a courtier or emissary had made him a better offer. Some scholars wonder if the Confraternity balked at the picture, considered as an exposition of its great Immaculate theme. It does seem to make more sense – though nothing, in my view, is ...”

“... wealth from the haves to the have-nots. Four-fifths of Germans paid no direct war taxes up until 8 May 1945, and indirect taxation was modest: duties on tobacco, brandy and beer (this last tax was lower in the beer-loving south), but never on wine. Tax burdens fell on the well-to-do. As the title of the German edition of this book has it, this was a ...”

“... king, on whose eyes had been laid crosses in gold foil, was found in Prittlewell in Essex; he may reasonably be identified as King Saeberht of Essex (d. 617), who was the first of his line to convert to Christianity and made possible the institution of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Metal detecting has also given us the Staffordshire Hoard, discovered ...”

“... the canonical American speech of reconciliation. It has not occurred to him that our time may be more suited to the House Divided speech, in which Lincoln in 1858 showed why the slavery question was so important it might make the two sides irreconcilable. Obama’s many House United speeches, by contrast, are always about unity for its own sake – a ...”

“... in something blatantly untrue’, since he identifies it so blatantly, but there may be no other way of getting at whatever truth is lurking here and won’t translate into literality. Such fictions (about the invention of cinema, about all-redeeming moments, about rooms where our deepest wishes are granted) are not only fictions, and can’t ...”

“... Facebook may have started as a way to rank one woman’s hotness over another’s, but it has been quick to produce its first feminists. Everything goes faster in Silicon Valley: code is written overnight; engineers get around the office on aerodynamic skateboards called RipStiks; a company less than ten years old is worth $104 billion for a day before losing $35 billion in value ...”

“... are drugs which are structurally similar to chemicals required for normal cellular processes, and may halt cell division or growth. In the summer of 1947 Sidney Farber, a specialist in children’s diseases, diagnosed acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) in the two-year-old son of a Boston shipyard worker. ALL almost always killed, sometimes within days of ...”

“... status’. When we look at some of the words Ogilvie identifies as suffering in this way, we may feel a little sympathetic to Burchfield: was it so strange for him to apply this most discreet of labels to sambal, the name of a Malay condiment, or kuruma, a Japanese word for a rickshaw? Burchfield arrived in Oxford from New Zealand in 1949 and died in ...”

“... DPs to Palestine. Operations were temporarily suspended after Israel’s formal establishment in May 1948 because of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but resumed in 1949, when the IRO paid ‘Joint’ (the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) and the Jewish Agency for Palestine $10 million to move 120,000 Jewish DPs to Palestine. The total number of ...”

“... the ICC’s move poses a real threat to the unstable peace in the south and west of Sudan, and may well increase the chances of state violence against civilians and aid workers. Who then will pay the price for the ICC’s pretensions to global relevance? The trouble with human rights as an ideology, in Zolo’s view, is its failure to address collective ...”

“... stand in the way of what he saw as the truth. The furore surrounding Newman’s conversion to Rome may seem strange today. But the theologian was one of the most distinguished minds in Oxford; Oxford was a bastion of Anglican doctrine, defending and preserving it rather as the Vatican did with Catholic dogma; and Anglicanism played a vital role in the ...”

“... much besides. Among other grisly discoveries noted are the finds at Repton in Derbyshire, which may have included – the site has been repeatedly disturbed since it was first discovered in 1686 – a tall skeleton in a stone sarcophagus, and a stack of bones from 264 individuals, most of them unusually tall and robust males. Battle-dead? Massacre? Monkish ...”

“... But then the surprise lasts only as long as we are not thinking very hard. Monuments may or may not endure, but they are not looked at very closely; and fragile-seeming gestures, songs, jokes, metaphors, teasing sentences, often have long lives in the intimacy of many minds. It’s easy, and usually rash, to ...”