“... and no hand in the attack. At that time, in other words, and alongside neo-con celebrities such as Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol, Fukuyama was beating the drum for a ‘shift in focus from al-Qaida to Iraq’. He now expresses qualms about the killing of ‘tens of thousands’ of innocent Iraqis who had done nothing to harm America or its ...”

“... on Hobson’s Imperial race. London, the heart of the Empire, as Hobson’s fellow new liberal, Charles Masterman, declared in The Condition of England (1909), was inhabited by that ‘homogeneous substance: the City Dweller’. This creature had strange crowd propensities which were a source of irresolvable mysteries and riddles. Moreover, ‘it is in the ...”

“... more radical view forward in the 1981 book Genes, Minds and Culture, in which he and his co-author Charles Lumsden tried to trace the influence of genes on human thought and culture as well as on basic human behaviour. Genes, Minds and Culture does not shrink from making bold assertions. It contains, for example, a series of elaborate mathematical equations ...”

“... hundred years ago in 1795, leaving behind a massive cache of highly personal manuscripts in the hope that their publication would pay his debts, finance his children and perpetuate his name. Instead, the frankness of some of their content caused them to be hidden away for more than a century, Boswell’s Victorian descendants even allowing it to be thought ...”

“... Jefferson, and espoused a leftish liberalism intended to recall America to her mission as the best hope of the common man rather than the conservative super-power she has too often become. At the same time, he has preached the need to marry Marx and Jefferson to anyone who would listen in Eastern Europe, in an effort to drag Communist regimes back into the ...”

“... was categorically told ‘by an authority on Irish politics’ that as a foreigner he ‘could not hope to understand the dynamic of Irish nationalism ... there was no sociological, sectarian or class problem or angle in it from beginning to end.’ However, Lenin and Connolly chose to believe that Ireland had to be independent before the workers could rightly ...”

“... night,’ so he tells Arthur, his older son. ‘Maybe one day you’ll have one like it too. I hope you will.’ Arthur nods curtly, more pained than embarrassed. He can’t bear born-again Christians: they don’t even believe the revelations of Charles Darwin. Arthur was out with his girl while Robbie was in his agony ...”

“... between them still persists, and in Nairobi they begin to come together again, this time with the hope of a child at last. It is easy to see that this is a novel on entirely traditional lines. A young woman confronts her destiny, with little to help her but courage and persistence – like any heroine of Charlotte Brontë or George Eliot or Henry James. She ...”

“... this fine biography. Mary Kingsley was the daughter of George Kingsley, the younger brother of Charles. The DNB gallantly falsifies the date of George’s marriage, which was only four days before Mary’s birth. His wife (thought to have been his cook) was a competent businesswoman and, unexpectedly, a good shot with a revolver. Mary learned from her the ...”

“... first of all accepting it.’ This should give pause to those in the post-Communist world who hope that some kind of simple restoration of the old pre-Communist regimes might still be possible, that the heritage of Communism can simply be put in brackets. In France, the Revolutionary tradition died a slow, agonising death between 1789 and 1871, and when ...”

“... to have come through the school in recent years, has described a visit to White Lodge by Prince Charles while she was a pupil there, during which security dogs, nosing around in advance of the royal party, sniffed out her stash of forbidden chocolate. But there are other stories. Classical dance is fixated on youth, on yet to be fulfilled promise; it ...”

“... the puritan tradition. This study by Sheila Kirk and the equally thoughtful photographs by Martin Charles that go with it at last set out the full evidence on which this claim can rest. Webb was 18 and embarking on an obscure apprenticeship in Reading when The Seven Lamps of Architecture came out in 1849. By the time he met Ruskin seven years later, he was a ...”

“... Jesuit Desideri, who wrote about Lhasa in the early 18th century, and, in the 20th century, Sir Charles Bell and Hugh Richardson, British scholars and diplomats who both spoke Tibetan, and two Austrian mountaineers, Heinrich Harrer and Peter Aufschnaiter, who landed there for several years after escaping from British internment in India during World War ...”