“... as it were, from the heights of speculative self-absorption, and their ideas put to work in the service of imaginative scholarship. There is much to be said for Josipovici’s enterprise. Opponents of ‘theory’ tend to regard it as something monolithic and entirely given over to the business of tightening its own nuts and bolts. F.R. Leavis was subject ...”

“... low at the time because the Mirror was doing rather well. It had no proprietor. A year earlier, Robert Maxwell, who, with Mrs Thatcher’s encouragement, had been allowed to buy the Mirror in spite of the findings of a government report 13 years previously that he was unfit to run a public company, had gone overboard once too often and drowned. Trade unions ...”

“... jar or finger burn, and the advantages of cooking for yourself are mostly to do with customer service. You’re less likely to get ripped off or have a gun pointed at your head: powder cocaine dealers are easier to find and more reliable. ‘More genteel’ is the way Hunter Biden describes his decision to ‘eliminate one layer of drug-world ...”

“... are audibly mapped.There are also thousands of memorable moments, some distinguished by hindsight (Robert Maxwell declaring: ‘I will have left the world a slightly better place by having lived in it’), some by the way radio forefronts every tic, hesitation and obfuscation, and some by personal revelation. In 2020, as Covid added a piquancy to the ...”

“... of self-importance’. It attached even to his private writings, notably his surviving letters to Robert Harley, soon to be secretary of state and eventually unofficial prime minister. Harley rescued Defoe from Newgate, after he was convicted of seditious libel. He wanted to use him, and gave him a heady sense of influence over the times. For the first decade ...”

“... with extensive observation observe mankind extensively’ – but its comprehensiveness is in the service of indeterminacy. The first sentence of the Life of Savage performs an elaborate balancing act, making equations and distinctions between nature and fortune, rank and capacity, the particular sufferings of those doomed to ambition by ‘apparent ...”

“... not straight ethnography, however: Segalen had a case to make, the same case that Gauguin and Robert Louis Stevenson had made before him, against the degradation of native life which had set in, first with the coming of Christian missionaries to the islands early in the 19th century, and then with the onset of a colonial administration. The Maoris had ...”

“... to these technological developments, and there are even attempts to downgrade their significance. Robert Kubicek argues that in numerous armed clashes between the British and local peoples between 1875 and 1907, ‘both sides had modern weaponry.’ So they did, but Winston Churchill was appalled by the one-sided slaughter at the Battle of Omdurman in ...”

“... in the age of rising nationalisms. ‘The Hungarians were first and last only Hungarians,’ Robert Musil wrote in The Man without Qualities, ‘and counted only incidentally . . . as also Austro-Hungarians. The Austrians, on the other hand, were primarily nothing at all . . . there was not even a proper word for it. And there was no such thing as ...”

“... into the open in the US. With the exception of Donald Rumsfeld, who conveniently did his military service in the gap between the Korean and Vietnam Wars, neither Bush nor any of the other prime movers of this war served in the military. Of course, General Colin Powell served in Vietnam, but he is well known to be extremely dubious about attacking Iraq. All ...”

“... reported his interrogation of two British officers to the Swiss Red Cross. As a result, Captain Robert MacGregor and Lt Capsis were accorded POW status, escaping the Sonderbehandlung – execution – of Commandos which was ordered by Hitler in October 1942. ‘Of course I knew about British Commandos,’ said Waldheim, ‘only I myself never interrogated ...”

“... Invisible ink … Trampolines/aniseed sweets/painted eggs. Pencil sharpenings? Magic Faraway, Robert the something, Robert the Rose Horse?’ The bereaved man is convinced by this performance, even marginally consoled: ‘Thank you Crow.’ ‘All part of the ...”

“... more crazy if we were to have more casualties on our side to save the Japanese. This is quoted in Robert Kee’s 1945 – The World We Fought For. Kee’s method is to construct an account of the year from contemporary newspapers and journals. Its vice is that it can look rather lazily tacked together. Its virtue is that it helps us to see events as the ...”

“... Freud planned to use Charlie for his painting Interior at Paddington, but he was doing National Service, so instead he used Harry Diamond. At the time the painting was made, in 1951, Diamond was working as a stagehand and thus was free during the day. For six months, he stood as instructed in Freud’s studio. When he saw the painting, he said that his legs ...”

“... them Queen Elizabeth’s surgeon, John Banister, as well as Francis Bacon, Sir Kenelm Digby and Robert Boyle. Mummy continued to be dispensed well into the 18th century, when Robert James’s Pharmacopeia Universalis (1747) advised: Mummy resolves coagulated Blood, and is said to be effectual in purging the Head, against ...”