“... author overwrites to such a degree that he gives the impression of being deeply insecure about the power of his words. What I found perhaps the novel’s best joke – a character born in ‘one of those Oak Hill Park Forest Elm Grove places’, in other words, a Chicago suburb – is spoilt by Powers’s inability to leave well alone: he has no less than ...”

“... they never come from less celebrated areas, like, say, the Windward Isles or the court of Henry III?) The father sells a popular placebo, made of garlic-flavoured water, and this helps to finance the spiritualist church in his back garden. Yet he despises the gullibility of those who buy patent medicines and such gadgets as ‘the Wonder Worker, a ...”

“... On 11 November 2001, the New York Times announced a major literary discovery. Henry Louis Gates, chairman of the African-American Studies Department at Harvard, had bought at auction the unpublished manuscript of the ‘earliest known novel by a female African-American slave and probably the earliest known novel by a black woman anywhere ...”

“... father was an assistant professor at Harvard, that Cambridge was still thought of as the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, both recently deceased, and that across the river was a Boston which still called itself ‘the Athens of America’. Edward Cummings, the father, was a man of modern outlook, if only in certain respects. A ...”

“... the form of the liberal conception of non-interference or the Roman idea of non-dependence on the power of someone else.In recovering this lost Roman concept of freedom, Skinner had, as he warmly acknowledged, an ally in the political theorist Philip Pettit. But there is a subtle distinction between their positions. Whereas Pettit emphasises non-domination as ...”

“... became. She was a being without reverence (except for literary figures) and she regarded men of power, authority and doctrine with a kind of withering cynicism.’ What she cared about was writing. Litvinov’s career from 1920 until his death in 1951 is summarised by the chapter heading ‘Switchback’. He was either in, out or on the slide. In the ...”

“... to a wised-up, historical awareness like Muldoon’s. Neither General Jeffrey Amherst nor Colonel Henry Bouquet can stomach the willow-tobacco the Indians offer. And in return They gave us six fishhooks and two blankets embroidered with smallpox. The disorientations Muldoon stores up here, and unleashes in the poem’s final word, resonate throughout ...”

“... with its accumulations of images and memories and deposits of mud, as easily as all that; the power and fascination of each of Swift’s novels, including this one, rest on some such dogged affirmation. Richard Powers is an American writer whose quest for 20th-century history is also a quest for European origins. August Sander’s photograph of the three ...”

“... trying to baptise several Salem ministers who promptly had him put in an asylum for a month); and Henry David Thoreau (and if Emerson was Arctic, what zone can we designate for the glacial Thoreau? Emerson himself said: ‘As for taking Thoreau’s arm, I should as soon take the arm of an elm tree’). There were also the various members and guests of the ...”

“... elder sister Katherine Ashley (née Champernowne), who was appointed Elizabeth’s governess by Henry VIII in 1544. Ashley was undoubtedly the person closest to Elizabeth for the next twenty years, but she died in 1565, when Ralegh was only 11, so her direct influence on his advancement was minimal. What is so striking is how rapidly this took place. At the ...”

“... Donald Dewar, the father of devolved government, died and was succeeded by the relatively obscure Henry McLeish. An absence of name recognition undermined public perceptions of the gravitas of the devolved Parliament and the quality of its work. The Scottish media might have been expected to help people understand the new Parliament and its innovative working ...”

“... make progress towards realising their people’s highest aspiration is to push when central power is temporarily weak, then try to hold the line on their gains when it rebounds, as it invariably does. Whenever possible they expand the territory they control – taking over oil and gas reserves in adjacent areas – and assert greater authority over ...”

“... especially in the 1930s and 1940s, when large-scale manufacturing was coming into its own. Henry Ford was a global icon who counted Hitler among his admirers. As soon as he took power, Hitler had tried hard but in vain to make German car manufacturers abandon their small-scale production methods in favour of mass ...”

“... was he as miserable as he said? Cyril Connolly was there and he wasn’t miserable. Neither was Henry Longhurst. The evidence is conflicting. Shelden thinks that Mrs Wilkes, the headmaster’s formidable wife, ‘helped to shape’ Orwell’s ‘character, and he never entirely outgrew her influence, no matter how much he may have wanted to blot it ...”

“... Anthropologists in the 19th and 20th centuries sought to follow Rousseau’s directive. Lewis Henry Morgan wrote the first landmark work, Ancient Society (1877), in which he defined three stages of social evolution: ‘savagery’, ‘barbarism’ and ‘civilisation’; the second was Evolution and Culture (1960), edited by Elmen Service and Marshall ...”