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“... both Tsarist and Soviet, puts everything else in the shade: between 1901 and 1966 there were no fewer than seven different multi-volume ‘Collected Works’ published in Russian. In the interwar years, he was more than a literary celebrity: he was an international guru, dispensing his own brand of scientific optimism and preaching the need for a world ...”

“... 2000, a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Still the archive remained sealed, nikomu ne vydavat’ – not to be seen by anyone without the written approval of the Prokofiev estate. The only papers to have been released are Prokofiev’s diaries for the years 1907 to 1933. Svyatoslav published them in Russian in 2002, reconstructing them from his ...”

“... people are rare, business insolvencies are high and a very large number of people have no qualifications. Four in every ten jobs are in the public sector – the NHS, local government and education. People die younger here than in almost any other place in the UK. It’s a story people who live here know well: in the national media it is always the ...”

“... have made an early medieval monarch proud, and given the long history of dispute over Alsace, no doubt similar conditions frequently did just that. To rule over an abundance of tongues and laws showed that you were more than just a local ruler: an increase in diversity signalled an increase in power. More lands meant an increase in the number of potential ...”

“... doesn’t think with much penetration about its subject but doesn’t interfere with it either, no flashy stuff. Wendy Pollard’s record of Johnson’s life is scrupulous; she sticks to the diaries and the letters and the work, and her admiration for her subject and enthusiasm for Johnson’s writing is unflagging. By the end of the book the enthusiasm ...”

“... by 1943. If his books now end up in charity shops alongside discarded copies of the F-Plan Diet or John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, it’s because the shimmering and peaceable ‘England’ he promised is not, after all, to be found waiting at the end of a deserted lane, or, if it were, we’d never know, because we’d be stuck in a traffic ...”

“... to the travelling menageries of the 18th and 19th centuries, shuttered in so that passers-by got no free view; and as he says (and I saw for myself last year in Yunnan), in China and many emerging economies such horrors are still standard. The history of zoos encapsulates all human attitudes to our fellow ...”

“... Worship: the great Prayer Book Protest of 2000. Today, resistance is likely to come only from John Major’s little old ladies on bicycles, and from the Prayer Book Society – which may well have more members than those lobbies of fuel protesters. It was Cranmer’s intention that what was said in church should be ‘understanded of the people’. The ...”

“... Born with a silver spoon, Malcolm Braly became a mouthpiece for the no-hopers and might-have-beens in America’s prisons. He was inside for almost twenty years and finished On the Yard (1967) in the final few months of his stretch. It was an unlikely career for a novelist, though Braly, who took a dim view of his success, never seemed surprised, certain that his fate had been forecast from the start ...”

“... provides a foil for the pronounced black which is a feature of so many of the pictures. There is no obtrusive signage, but a glance at the floor plan reveals that the rooms are devoted to different artistic movements. Turning right, we are among the Surrealists. Magritte’s sinister suburban L’Empire des lumières is on the end wall. There is a Delvaux on ...”

“... for the wider struggle; she writes approvingly of egalitarian marriages, such as that of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, but is less interested in – perhaps even a little suspicious of – women who were sexually free or who publicly challenged gender roles. She skates over the divisions in the movement, and rather than predict possible ...”

“... out that Yale had named many of its colleges after slaveholders and pro-slavery leaders, including John C. Calhoun College in 1933 and Samuel F.B. Morse College in 1961, and noted that in 1831 Yale officials had helped to block the establishment of a college for Black Americans in New Haven. They called for Yale ‘to acknowledge how it has benefited from the ...”

“... the names of Rudolf Slansky, Ehrlich and Alter, Max Schachtman, Andres Nin, Amadeo Bordiga and John Dewey are, still, names with which to puncture an argument, break up a friendship, revise an article or inaugurate a new and daring small magazine. Keywords include ‘Doctors’ Plot’, ‘Deutscherite’, ‘PR Crowd’, ‘Vyshinsky’ and ...”

“... he is a supersonic G.M. Trevelyan, then in another he is the thinking man’s Lord Mountbatten. No one can travel so much, do so much or write so much without attracting his detractors: the greater the achievement, the larger the target. Compared with his immediate contemporaries, Briggs’s writing lacks the combative forcefulness of G.R. Elton, the ...”

“... as a result of the Arab conquest of the sea’s eastern, southern and western shores, they could no longer do so. The economy of western Europe was reduced to ‘natural’ levels, its political and cultural centre of gravity shifted northwards into more emphatically ‘barbarian’ areas, and the result was the emergence of an unashamedly Germanic Roman ...”