“... Edinburgh did adopt him. His talents took him to the Royal High School, where William Drummond, Henry Mackenzie and Walter Scott had been before him. There Karl became favourite pupil and close friend of Hector MacIver, that incomparable teacher of literature, who recognised his gifts and took him with his other clever boys down the Calton Hill to Rose ...”

“... leading management books of the Eighties have been American, and ‘excellence’ is their creed. Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman Junior’s In Search of Excellence1 appeared in 1982 and it quickly established itself as the best-selling management book ever. Here was an unambiguous riposte to the Japanese economic miracle, that Pearl Harbour of the Carter ...”

“... Few​ today remember Captain Henry Hill (1812-82), a military tailor turned quartermaster of the First Sussex Rifle Volunteers. According to the Brighton census of 1881, Hill, who was then in his late sixties, lived on ‘funded property’ at 53 Marine Parade with his wife, Charlotte; his 27-year-old nephew, James; and three servants ...”

“... defining piece on the meaning of the terror attacks’ in a profile studded with praise from Henry Kissinger which also proposed Zakaria as America’s first Muslim secretary of state. Tina Brown called him ‘New York’s hot brainiac of choice’. Zakaria’s article appeared during the moment of primitive fury that overcame even ...”

“... neither here nor there but I may as well admit that too. And then I read The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas, an anti-Freudian Holocaust novel. My parents had it. I remember the passage on the letter scene in Eugene Onegin. (The heroine performs Tatiana.) I also remember the horrifying passage on Babi Yar, where the heroine dies, and where in reality many of my ...”

“... goods up the River Parrett under the name of the Somerset Trading Company. Robert’s younger son, Thomas, married the niece of Samuel Stuckey, the founder of Stuckey’s Bank, a sizeable local house which had already swallowed up several tiddlers. Thomas rose to become vice-chairman, and so in due course did his son ...”

“... them, in a racist dramaturgy that produces tragic destruction.Twelfth Night’s other neighbour is Thomas More, the probably unperformed manuscript play by many hands on which more than one theatre company seems to have worked, fitfully, over several years. John Jowett’s Arden edition brilliantly re-dated the play from the 1590s to 1600-04, with Hand ...”

“... and servants. Another point of triangulation is the concept of the preternatural, promulgated by Thomas Aquinas and described in an essay by Lorraine Daston as ‘that twilight zone between the natural and the supernatural’. As Daston notes, the preternatural was a particularly influential idea in the High Middle Ages – uncanny and marvellous, positioned ...”

“... reductionism which popular works on the historiography of science have done little to discourage. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions envisaged competition between two rival and incommensurable ‘paradigms’ as the hallmark of a revolutionary period. A greater theoretical diversity and the science had to be regarded as immature and ...”

“... most subtle originality, in fact, could be said to anticipate and even to make a principle out of Henry James’s comment: ‘Properly speaking, relations stop nowhere, and the task of the artist is eternally but to draw the circle in which they shall happily appear to do so.’ James’s way of doing this was to squeeze the orange, as it were – to saturate ...”

“... This persona, also called the Romantic Robin, was created early in the 19th century by Keats, Thomas Love Peacock and, above all, Scott, whose Ivanhoe not only features the character of Locksley (Robin Hood) but bases its plot on what Knight calls ‘a displaced Robin Hood story’. The fourth category is Robin on stage or in film. But the apparent ...”

“... ideological lineage going back to the Republican Party of the 1790s, a radical organisation led by Thomas Jefferson. The first party system gave way around 1830 to the battles of the Whigs and the Jacksonian Democrats. The emergence of today’s Republican Party during the 1850s as an open adversary of Southern ‘Slave Power’ and the advent of the Civil War ...”

“... of an unlikely coalition of political leaders and intellectuals, including Stalin, Einstein, Henry Ford, Mussolini, Fritz Kreisler, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, H.L. Mencken, Anatole France, H.G. Wells, the dean of Harvard Law School, Roscoe Pound and 205 members of the law school’s 1927 graduating class. Interest ...”

“... following year, in an essay in the catalogue published by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Henry-Russell Hitchcock also included pictures of the GSA and claimed that ‘no work of British architecture could more appropriately serve as an introduction to an exhibition of Modern Architecture in England.’ The tendency to see Mackintosh primarily as a ...”

“... at risk. At the suggestion of his home secretary – and president of the Board of Control – Henry Dundas, Pitt decided to send Macartney (who had some diplomatic distinction, apparently because Catherine the Great found him fetching) as an ‘ambassador extraordinary’ to China. Dundas wanted more direct access to the China market; some kind of ...”