“... low-productivity pits was a crucial problem.’ The social consequences of pit closures seem of little concern to him. Thus his chapter on ‘The Gormley Era’ opens with the declaration that in the late 1960s ‘the industry was now in what I see as the years of consolidation.’ Yet this was a decade when the NCB closed 400 of its 700 collieries, cutting ...”

“... a Privatdozent (unpaid) in Munich, later as professor in Kiel and finally in Berlin. They aroused little interest. His appointment at Kiel was given in the confidence ‘that he would remain faithful in unbreakable loyalty to His Majesty the Emperor and to the Imperial Family’. To Planck that read, not as an empty phrase, but as a sacred duty to which he ...”

“... under fifty years) could not be relied on much for a definition of humanity, since he has had so little time to meet any of the species. Robert Heinlein’s totally self-indulgent The cat who walks through walls (to be acquitted of malignant sexism only on the ground that it is also so innocently pubescent) has made its author two million dollars so far. The ...”

“... absurd animals as men is the mixed one such as ours, which goes on a sort of Jogg Trott with little éclat, with many abuses, as many faults, with a considerable share of tranquillity, and no horrors.’ Bew makes no attempt to rebut the contemporary charge of the Ulster radical William Steel Dickson that Castlereagh was ‘the unblushing betrayer of his ...”

“... in the notion of Baudelaire as an ‘icon of modernity’, yet Baudelaire’s own writings betray little enthusiasm for progress or the future: ‘Poetry and progress,’ he observed, ‘are two ambitious men that hate each other, with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet along a pathway one or other must give way.’ But it was exactly Baudelaire’s ...”

“... burial place remains unknown, and in Welsh folk memory he enjoys a reputation comparable to King Arthur. Meanwhile the English Prince of Wales (soon to be Henry V, victor of Agincourt) displayed his own heroism in a fight with the rebel Harry Percy, better known as Hotspur. In a pitched battle in 1403, the 16-year-old prince led his father’s rearguard. He ...”

“... aren’t a coincidence. Fidesz has been advised by American political consultants including Arthur J. Finkelstein, who began his career advising Nixon. According to Szelényi, the party has used the issue of gender ‘to bind together markedly different groups, such as committed Catholics, the less educated elderly and even radical football ...”

“... also strikingly different. Beveridge’s Report was formally commissioned by a Labour minister, Arthur Greenwood, and formally presented to another, William Jowitt. The Labour Party, both in Parliament and in the country, was its strongest proponent. And the Labour ministers of Churchill’s coalition had no doubt that the war, as Attlee put it, was to be ...”

“... thrall to the rhetoric of legitimacy, tend to impute to prospective voters the motivations of an Arthur Daley. The rhetoric of democratic politics wavers between moral aspiration and egoism, its talk of profit punctuated now and then by homilies about the family, ‘values’, Jesus and the rest. A conspicuous merit of Habermas’s account is its readiness ...”

“... is the assault of the old on the young, the system on the individual, the powers that be on the little people. Trumbo relies on sledgehammer irony: ‘I used to be a consumer,’ Joe explains at one point, ‘I’ve consumed more shrapnel and gunpowder than any living man.’ He prefers grandiose gestures and Biblical incantations to psychological or ...”

“... mind busy by working on a verse translation of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, which earned her ‘a little glory’ among those ‘intimate friends’ who saw it in manuscript. To attempt to render Lucretius’ difficult Latin in English was daring enough; to do it in elegant and coherent rhyming couplets was an achievement unattempted by anyone before and ...”

“... from the London School of Economics. He made his way to Dubai via jobs at the now defunct Arthur Andersen and the giant Saudi investment enterprise Olayan. In Dubai, he wheeled and dealed his way into the takeover of a former imperial trading company called Inchcape, which by the 1990s was involved in shipping, logistics, the automotive trade and ...”

“... figures in the new cabinet were the ‘big five’: MacDonald, Snowden, Thomas, Clynes and Arthur Henderson. Henderson, who became home secretary, had lost his seat in 1923 and required a by-election to return to the Commons. The remaining cabinet roles were filled by men who represented the various strands in the Labour movement. Some, such as William ...”

“... closed off by her security men. I see a couple of proprietorial Russians trying to ferry Arthur Miller to the graveside. Squeezing past, he steps apologetically on our toes in one direction and then again in the other direction – but gets no nearer the epicentre represented by Yevtushenko and the television cameras. Yevtushenko introduces each ...”

“... not just because they were considerably cheaper, which of course they were, but because one had little sense of being exploited. Now as I pay my water bills for instance, I think of their overpaid executives and the shareholders to whom the profits go and I know, despite the assurances of all such companies, that they are charging what they know they can ...”