“... Ku Klux Klan can be traced back to those of African secret societies: ‘such was the pervasive power of African-American culture that even a racist organisation designed to protect white civilisation paradoxically had to become African American to be effective.’ Well! Despite all this, the book contains some fascinating material drawn from a variety of ...”

“... lectures originally delivered in 1965 and then forgotten, until their existence was discovered by Henry Hardy, who shaped them into a publishable manuscript. The result is a happy one. Not only does the book give a sense of how Berlin began thinking about the opposition between the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment, it offers us yet another ...”

“... then upon only a handful of plays: Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, The Merchant of Venice, Othello and Henry IV. This Shakespeare criticism, moreover, is concentrated in the third of the book’s four chapters: ‘Shakespeare’s Imitation of the World’. Even there, it seems to exist less for its own sake than as a working demonstration of the kind of criticism ...”

“... her to have a slight stroke. Byron told Hobhouse that, when he was with her, Caroline had such a power over him he could do only what she pleased. Caroline was bound up with his social success, and he was swept along by her vivacity and her (usually) winning ways. Moreover, he felt that he was responsible for her plight. He well knew that an elopement would ...”

“... Fortunately, the US did better, but not without conflict. In mid-1944 the Treasury, under Henry Morgenthau Jr, carried the executive solution favoured by the British to its monstrous limit. Germany was to be declared a criminal nation, and crippled by destroying her heavy industries. Its leaders, since proving them individually guilty would be ...”

“... same. At the grounds, soccer has become a sanitised, sit-down spectacle. ‘The crowd conveys less power ... feels less exciting than it did. The damage done is not to the people at the top, but to the crowd itself, that central component of the game which makes football so fascinating.’ Police and stewards have occasionally mistaken shouting and ...”

“... The troubles at the LSE go back a long way. Perhaps they began on the day in July 1894 when Henry Hutchinson shot himself, thus activating the terms of the will that he had made. A loyal if morose member of the Fabian Society from Derby, Hutchinson had stipulated that the bulk of his sizeable fortune – say a million in today’s money – should be applied by his executors ‘to the propaganda and other purposes of the said Society and its Socialism ...”

“... implement’. In an obituary note written after she finally succumbed to colon cancer in 1897, Henry James paid characteristically equivocal tribute to this most prolific of women writers: ‘from no individual perhaps had the great contemporary flood received a more copious treatment.’ His obituary hovered between contempt for helpless female fecundity ...”

“... Thierry of Chartres, himself recalling Plato. But many years before Alan or Thierry, the Emperor Henry III, dealing with a group of Czech sea-lawyers, had told them brusquely: ‘The law has a nose of wax, as they say in the vulgar, and the king a hand of iron.’ Henry was not recalling Plato, he was remembering a popular ...”

“... Lizst had played for him; he had helped Marconi to transmit the first transatlantic radio signal; Henry James, ‘tears in his eyes’, would come running to him with a novelistic problem; Escoffier said he could ‘learn cooking’ from Ford. If Conrad, in a temper, banged his fist on the table and made the teacups jump, Ford must say that he threw the ...”

“... or a constabulary. It is a grand project, an ambition, a national glory or a national shame. Its power is hard-gained and fragile; its reputation can be won or lost in an afternoon. The worst of the winds and tides it has to face is the storm of public opinion, which can blow through the House of Commons and flatten a government.Just such a hurricane was ...”

“... recently retired as director of the Royal Ballet, Lydia became serious: ‘I do not like women in power.’ Then she told a story about a catastrophe during a performance in Paris of Poulenc’s Les Biches. Lydia Sokolova, dancing the hostess, was wearing a long string of pearls which broke during the Rag-Mazurka and scattered over the stage ‘like drops of ...”

“... sorry, but would the locative case do?’ – and is given membership of the group. Its leader is Henry Winter, who ‘wore dark English suits’ and apparently published a translation of Anacreon, with commentary, when still 18. Later in the novel he expresses surprise to learn that man has walked on the Moon. The oaf of the gang is Bunny Corcoran, Bunny ...”

“... she deeply admired. The most intriguing thing about her, and perhaps also the source of her power, remains the paradoxical combination of her passionate desire to succeed, to win the game she had chosen to play, together with our sense of her ultimate indifference to it. Something else gave her reality, possibly the something Fitzgerald had in mind when ...”

“... firmly accomplished placing of a simple artefact in the middle of a sprawling landscape has the power to fix an order upon it. The Duke’s vision is fancier:        And there In tiers of rose and grey will rise A wedding of Greece and China From which the landscape seems to fall As stair by stair turns round … But even the conscious muddle of ...”