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“... Now a literature professor at Princeton, the author as a young man trained for the US Naval Air Service in the war with Japan, and ended it on dive-bombers attacking the garrisons of Okinawa and Iwojima. His book gives a wonderfully intelligent and humane account of wartime life, neither distanced nor romanticised, and one that makes no effort to plug a ...”

“... Lafite du Languedoc’; others have been praised to the heights by the likes of Hugh Johnson and Robert Parker. The wine is now on the list at the Tour d’Argent and the 1986 vintage retails at the vineyard for £65 a bottle. The sole shadow on the lives of these millionaires is cast by the odd hailstorm. No one to whom I have begun recounting the story ...”

“... Cuvier – manoeuvred for mastery. In this world – to which our most trustworthy guide is not Robert Merton but Sir Lewis Namier or the Stendhal who understood Julien Sorel – Cuvier did indeed become the great place-man, dispensing a loaf here to nephew Charles and some fishes – mainly fossil ones – to brother Frédéric. And he did so because he ...”

“... seems so long ago. Zimbabwe has just celebrated the third anniversary of its independence. Comrade Robert Mugabe rules. Ministers have been fired, reinstated, shuffled sideways. The British have made an integrated national army out of the two guerrilla forces and the North Koreans have invited themselves to train a separate praetorian guard. The IMF has been ...”

“... in terms of years, the length of office of editors of Annales such as Burguière, Marc Eerro Robert Mandrou. (His conclusion? ‘If at first you don’t succeed ... ’) He has carefully mapped out – in the style of Jacques Bertin, the admirable draughtsman of Annales – the geographical origins of the contributors to the Mélanges Febvre of 1953 and ...”

“... heroes from history, toilet articles and rival makes of bicycle’. In the ‘Good’ list were Robert Burns, Amundsen, and the Raleigh. My family favoured the counterparts from the ‘Bad’ list: Sir Walter Scott (‘would-be aristocrat, eventual bankrupt’), Captain Scott (‘English gent who took ponies, came second, died’), and the BSA. Deep ...”

“... about when the glory days began. The New Statesman whose past is so ubiquitously pressed into service for rival versions of its future is the magazine whose identity was moulded during the Thirties, under the editorship of Kingsley Martin and after the merger with the Nation. Yet the New Statesman had almost two decades of existence before that, under an ...”

“... negatively, as the stereotypical bug-eyed monsters bent on conquering Earth.’ So much for Robert Heinlein’s Star Beast, Brian Aldiss’s The Dark Light-Years, Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, and a dozen other classics. Nimoy doesn’t pretend to be a scholar and he is not obliged to research his own historical background. But is there not a ...”

“... He tried this out on the theologians, and had to be treated to a firm doctrinal lesson by Bishop Robert Grosseteste on the spiritual inferiority of coronation to the anointing involved in priestly ordination. But priest or not, at Westminster, the king at his coronation would stand, as the emperors stood, on a disc of Roman porphyry, and at the centre of a ...”

“... in the fields of edifying tediousness; Sir Charles Grandison, Coelebs in Search of a Wife and Robert Elsmere, fallen favourites; bored heroines in Austen, Edgeworth, Ferrier, Brontë; Victorian boredom in Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope; modern boredom in Eliot, James, Waugh, Lawrence, Stein, Brookner, Berryman, Barthelme and Bellow. This list represents ...”

“... as a feminist, and has convinced herself that by abusing successful women in public, she does a service to her audience: ‘I think of myself as a leader in a support group.’ While Rivers, like Paglia, is quite open about her own narcissism and competitiveness, for her the female superstars Paglia worships are hated rivals. Elizabeth Taylor is to Rivers ...”

“... the world?Behavioural economics proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s. Its early adoptees included Robert Shiller, who won the Nobel Prize in 2013 for his research on asset price volatility and the psychology of bubbles. Economics and psychology are now closer than ever, with new fields like neuro-economics using fMRIs to map the way the brain processes ...”

“... subservience of 21st-century citizens to 18th-century political solutions, foremost among them Robert Dahl in his devastating audit of the American political system, How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (2002). Dahl’s attempt to stir Americans from their cultic attachment to the founders is more than matched, however, by the efforts of ...”

“... was lucky: syphilis did not carry him off in his prime. Consider the 19th-century Scottish surgeon Robert Liston, ‘tall . . . powerful . . . dressed in dark bottle-green coat with velvet collar . . . grey trousers and Wellington boots, thumb stuck in the armhole of his vest . . . chewing a tooth pick’, and famous for conducting the first major operation ...”

“... 2002) was the army chief of staff, Eric Shinseki. Shinseki has been portrayed in the media and service hagiography as a martyr who spoke truth to power and sacrificed his career in consequence. The record – Rumsfeld is happy to lay it out in detail – shows that Shinseki cautiously observed in a Senate hearing just a month before the war that ‘several ...”