“... to no women were employed in astronomy, or any other science, elsewhere. (An excellent book by George Johnson focuses on one of those women, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, the under-acknowledged astronomer who deduced a way to measure distances in space.) Writing about a group of people is tricky – it is easier for a reader to connect to the story of an ...”

“... be dissolved,’ writes Swinburne. The legal point is of interest to jurists because of what George Elliott Howard called ‘the puzzling and disastrous antagonism of legality and validity’. The consequences are of interest to social historians because of the co-existence of casual ease in the manner of forming the bond and the absoluteness of the bond ...”

“... genteel, but by the time that was clear the Great War had started, so nobody blamed Uncle George. ‘Today there are no Hemingways left in Oak Park, but there are plenty of squirrels.’ So, in summary, runs the ominously leisurely opening paragraph, and it is followed by much more significant detail about crime-free Oak Park, the nobs’ refuge from ...”

“... to match the monumental character of the prose. Fruscione compares Hemingway’s biographer Michael Reynolds’s story of Ernie returning in 1919 to his high school in Oak Park to show off his blood-stained uniform to the children, with a ‘similar act of masculine self-aggrandisement’ on Faulkner’s part. This was steep, even by Hemingway standards ...”

“... vote. They did this in part by adapting the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Michael Heilperin, a founding member of Mont Pelerin, wrote the ICC’s International Code to Protect Foreign Investments, which enshrined the ‘preferential’ standing of foreign investors over the host state. Neoliberals, in other words, deftly promoted the ...”

“... in 1951 included Henry Reed, Lawrence Durrell. Christopher Fry, C. Day Lewis, Lennox Berkeley, Michael Tippett, William Walton, Laurie Lee and Stevie Smith. Until the early Fifties the BBC appeared to get a good return from its policy of patronising highbrow talent. From the inauguration of the Italia Prize in 1949, until 1955, of 15 entries chosen as the ...”

“... sermons. There, ‘sitting across from me and addressing me angrily in a loud voice, Father Michael Butler, chaplain of the university – and a lovely man – slowly read the words of the Bull in Latin … This is the kind of experience that stays with you, especially when you’re not even a proper Catholic.’ After such an experience you must turn ...”

“... its feckless dependents. The strategy was astoundingly successful in winning over public opinion. George Osborne, the chancellor, evoked a shift worker ‘leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits’. In an interview with the Sun, Duncan Smith more ...”

“... it. He died in 1962. In his admirably perceptive introduction to the now reprinted masterpiece, Michael Holroyd comments on Hamilton’s Scottish provenance, something that had never occurred to me when I first took to him. His father had been an eccentric and a ‘character’, whose powers of acting and sermonising had been complimented by no less a ...”

“... and the counter-revolution exist not only in the world at large but also within himself. As George Orwell really did say in another context, it would almost be worth being dead to have something like that written about you. And in The Great Melody, O’Brien expanded upon some of these themes, without actually expanding them very much. Yet here we have ...”

“... Albanians are predominantly Muslim. The Government repeatedly refers to Serb atrocities which, George Robertson teaches us, Europe has not seen the like of ‘since the Middle Ages’. Isuppose if you overlook the period 1914-45, he does have a point. Maybe it is this barbarism that excludes Kosovo from Europe? In fact, Kosovo, like anywhere else in the ...”

“... pre-emptively by claiming that the European Convention on Human Rights does not apply in Iraq. George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, was quoted in May 2004 as distinguishing between the ‘barbaric’ televised executions of Westerners and the merely ‘shameful’ abuses of Iraqis by Westerners. This effort to tabulate degrees of cruelty (in ...”

“... scholarly assessment’. It was about a year and a half before the speculation was scotched. Michael Durey, writing in the TLS, proved that ‘Mr Wordsworth’ was in fact the poet’s cousin Robinson Wordsworth, collector of customs at Harwich, who was being paid for expenses incurred in arresting and taking to London two men accused of treason. He also ...”

“... wrong, legal and illegal, honour and dishonour’. And there it remains today, while its leaders (Michael Hayden, James Clapper – to mention just two) perjure themselves and pose alongside the FBI as guardians of public truth. Despite the show of unity, Hersh says, he had always noticed that the CIA sustained a contempt for the FBI; he wondered why until an ...”

“... the region probably contained huge oil reserves and that the Royal Navy would require oil, Lloyd George told his French opposite number, Clemenceau, that he wanted Mosul; Clemenceau provisionally agreed. The deal finally went through in 1926 and Syria lost this territory too, as well as the prospect of significant oil wealth; Mosul and its population became ...”