“... the invention of the breechloading metal cartridge, which made rifled weapons easy to load. Soon Smith and Wesson revolvers and Enfield rifles made rapid, accurate fire possible for the first time. If the argument against gun ownership is that guns are too dangerous to be entrusted to individuals who may be mad or bad, then 1850 would seem to be the date at ...”

“... who insisted that much past and present philosophy is unverifiable nonsense; and, more recently, Daniel Dennett, who indicts the discipline as largely ‘self-indulgent, clever play’. In almost every case, the philosopher who criticises philosophy wants his colleagues to redirect their intellectual efforts away from the ineffable, nonsensical or confused ...”

“... in the Dream Team, Lord Foster and the Skidmore Owings & Merrill group went up, while stock in Daniel Libeskind and others fell. But also, implicitly, one should be an echt New Yorker, and here Foster went down (maybe out), Libeskind up a bit, while the Dream Team, SOM and the ‘Think’ group led by Rafael Viñoly, a veteran of big buildings who works ...”

“... in Seventeen, wins the Mademoiselle contest for her story ‘Sunday at the Mintons’; she attends Smith, meets her benefactress, Olive Higgins Prouty; she breaks her leg skiing, works at Mademoiselle as a guest editor, breaks down and attempts suicide; she’s electrocuted, administered insulin shock therapy and begins analysis with Dr Ruth Beuscher; she wins ...”

“... of Jane Austen, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence, Dickens’s Hard Times and half of Daniel Deronda. The ‘great tradition’ doubtless stands for something much less rigorous in Mr Patten’s mind, but it is nevertheless likely to deny to early adolescents the opportunity of enjoying some of the fiction best suited to their age group. Nor will ...”

“... The 18th-century forebears of utilitarianism and classical political economy like Hume and Adam Smith had doubted that we could understand much about other people, but didn’t think that that mattered much. Common psychological characteristics could be assumed, and social conventions and rules of exchange would serve to co-ordinate human behaviour and ...”

“... or green cotton cassock, a cap or such-like, and will take incredible pains for such a trifle’. Daniel Defoe agreed that other nations might be taught ‘clothing with decency, not shameless and naked; feeding with humanity, and not in a manner brutal; dwelling in towns and cities, with economy and government, and not like savages’. But these changes ...”

“... apparently split themselves in two and do both. Just ten minutes ago I heard Alexander McCall Smith, a writer of feel-good detective novels, tell an interviewer how his work comes to him through his ‘unconscious’: plots, characters, everything bubbles up from the murky depths and tells him its story. He just types it out. Now this I envy. My ...”

“... revealed that between them Policy Exchange, Legatum, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Adam Smith Institute and the TaxPayers’ Alliance have raised $9 million from US donors since 2012. The British and American right differ in the weight they place on ideological purity. With a limited cast of characters – and an even smaller pool of funders ...”

“... Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper ...”

“... buried in Glasnevin Cemetery beside others who had fought and suffered for the cause of Ireland: Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell, Paddy Dignam. Although there is a large collection of Casement documents in the National Library in Dublin (and other items which he brought back from Africa and South America – including costumes and a butterfly ...”

“... security. Mexico, the largest and wealthiest of them, has come closest. Mexico, says Peter Smith, in his chapter in the Cambridge History, ‘stands out as a paragon of political stability within Latin America’. There have been no serious efforts to produce political destabilisation, either from without or from within, since the Revolution of ...”

“... of the past with material on the poem’s life in present-day Iran. In his useful new edition Daniel Karlin argues – the case he makes is lively and convincing – that we have been misled by all the greenery-yallery stuff that has enveloped the Rubáiyát for decades, and that a different form of attention to FitzGerald allows a fascinating study in ...”

“... for example, the titles of influential works on this theme such as Virgin Land by Henry Nash Smith and Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness. Slotkin makes clear that the conquest of the West resulted from violence, not persuasion.In the Cold War years, many scholars aligned with the emerging discipline of American studies sought to ascertain what ...”

“... as well as objects, as when we say that the bridge collapsed because of the explosion, or that Smith went to the shops because it occurred to her that she needed some milk. That is, we routinely include mental and physical events in our ontology. Secondly, and only slightly less obviously, we allow that there can be different instances of the same general ...”