“... than remarks from others, and Dr Sharpe is too ready to rely on statements which deserve Mandy Rice-Davies’s famous reply. The question of how far Charles’s social policies were designed for the public good, and how far they were simply designed to make money is an interesting one. Yet it will not do to claim that patents of monopoly were concerned ...”

“... Party’s founding fathers anyway. (Both things are more or less right.) It is probably because John Smith, who led the party from July 1992 until his death in 1994, would not be prematurely enrolled in New Labour that the depiction of him here is so bleak. The man who might have led Labour to victory, thus bypassing the possibility of a Blair ...”

“... the photographs and, above all, in the index, which, for instance, suggests discreetly that both John McCain and Barack Obama indulged in adulterous liaisons with Lupe Vélez, the most fiery of Johnny Weissmuller’s five wives. The conceit is that the index was compiled before the lawyers looked at the manuscript, and remains unrevised after their ...”

“... both are made by the individual, who puts himself into them, puts in his ‘life illusion’, as John Cowper Powys called it, his unconscious fears and desires. History will not work without fiction, or at least the fictive principle, which Scott renounced as far as he could. This of course amounts to choosing a principle of another kind, but a negative ...”

“... always rose at the same early hour and preferred bland dishes of bean curd, salted turnips and rice congee. Mao is usually represented striding over the hills, or delivering impassioned lectures to soldiers who squat on the earth in front of him, or smiling and sharing a cigarette with peasants in his native village. Chiang is seen standing immobile in ...”

“... out of old bits of pop culture: the 1980s film Highlander; The Matrix; the Twilight and Anne Rice vampire stories; The Da Vinci Code. It’s depressingly inevitable that the Cathars crop up. (Why, in reincarnation dramas, is it always the Cathars? Why not Hindus or Anabaptists or Zoroastrians or Rastafarians?) Where the immortals are concerned, the ...”

“... than the licensed torture of a woman who knew women didn’t need men. By the time of John Badham’s 1979 Dracula, starring Frank Langella as ‘a Dracula of fusion’, the women have become ‘victims no more’, but passionate creatures liberated by his bite – seekers ‘who embrace vampirism as the sole available escape from ...”

“... split personality’: ‘The Japanese and American parts of me were now blended into one.’ John Okada’s novel No-No Boy, published in 1957, is bleaker; its title refers to a loyalty oath exacted from Japanese-Americans, which contains two key questions about their willingness to serve in the American Army and renunciation of allegiance to the ...”

“... classics of liberal philosophy and political theory – from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to John Rawls’s Theory of Justice – can’t realise their own putative ambitions without reckoning with the latent radicalism in their projects. For several years Ypi has been a co-editor of the Journal of Political Philosophy, an ...”

“... its will on an uneasy and reluctant political hierarchy. In an interview with my co-author Desmond Rice and myself after the publication of our book The Sinking of the ‘Belgrano’ last year, he gave this account: We just about got the War Cabinet to agree that we should repossess South on the way down. These [the Ministers] thought that would get bogged ...”

“... created by the unscrupulousness of local traders and by the diversion of staple foods, such as rice, to the British Army; the largest share of the blame must be apportioned to British rule. With the famines came an influx into Calcutta of the rural poor, who arrived in the city to die. Many of the poor to whom Mother Teresa would have ministered when she ...”

“... at both the large and unlovely University of Houston, where I am teaching, and the élite Rice University, which has a beautiful campus laid out by the Boston architect Ralph Adams Cram just before the Great War; Cram’s original Byzantine-eclectic halls and quadrangles are still being gracefully augmented by sympathetic architects such as Cesar ...”

“... as it raided lands throughout Eurasia. Wet conditions also prompted the spread of Champa rice cultivation in southern China under the Song Dynasty, which by the beginning of the 13th century was home to a third of the world’s population. When Kublai Khan, Genghis Khan’s grandson, completed the Mongol conquest of China in 1279, he achieved a ...”

“... In​ 1619, for a bet, John Taylor – prolific poet, proud Londoner, waterman, prankster, anti-pollution campaigner, barman, literary celebrity, palindrome enthusiast (‘Lewd did I live, & evil I did dwel’) – sailed forty miles down the Thames to Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey in a boat made from brown paper ...”

“... Sunday Times book, Philby, the spy who betrayed a generation, which he co-authored in 1968. Mr John Costello has produced Mask of Treachery, dealing with Blunt, while Mr Robert Cecil has written a biography of his former Foreign Office colleague Donald Maclean. To round things out, we have The Storm Birds, Gordon Brook-Shepherd’s study of the Soviet ...”