“... only after a tirade of anti-semitic remarks and character assassination. ‘However foolish one may wish to call this … to maintain my own integrity I thought it indispensable to claim to the last all the rights available to me under the law,’ he wrote in his memoirs. Arrested again in 1935 and sent to Dachau, he emerged in 1937 with plans to sue the ...”

“... Another ‘myth’ is that evolution has been ‘progressive’. This idea may have been inherited, as the authors suggest, from the Victorian concept of social evolution: but surely it is now possible to agree that in the 3000 million years of evolution from the earliest known bacteria to mammals and flowering plants there has been a ...”

“... produce appropriate outputs towards motor centres. The first response to the sound ‘Hullo’ may be a sharpening of attention and then, if it is repeated, perhaps a pattern of motor activity by the larynx and muscles of the throat that sends the response ‘Yes – is that you, James?’ There are evidently some gaps in the physiological story, but they ...”

“... the Astor Times and later with the Thomson Times. It was long after the event that I learned how Richard Scott, Laurance’s cousin and the chairman of the Scott Trust, flew to London from Washington on what my old employers would have called a ‘mercy mission’ to save us from being sold into slavery by his kinsman. This ignorance ...”

“... unnaturally large, with their heads reaching nearly up to the ceiling, as the British sculptor Richard Deacon showed us in photographs of visitors to the labyrinth of tiny tunnels which run under the city of Chicago. The tunnel becomes claustrophobic, oppressive, odd. On the other hand, if the tunnel is very large, it becomes ...”

“... meditative, fundamental critique of French Revolutionary ideals and practices. Professor Richard Lebrun’s monograph on Joseph de Maistre is, at many points, a pioneering effort. Burke’s indictment, with its complexly diverse legacy in Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, in Carlyle, in Yeats, and in Orwell’s riposte (both to Dickens and Burke), is ...”

“... we had determined weeks before the Demidenko affair reached its final phase to give the prize to Richard Flanagan, for his magical-realist investigation of Tasmania’s history, The Death of a River Guide. Helen Demidenko published her novel, The Hand That Signed the Paper, in 1994, when she was 23. She claimed that, like the narrator of her book, she had a ...”

“... abdication’. His gratification that this framework accommodates the findings of his contributors may be somewhat overdone. His second synthesis is a broader one which includes the lesser. It has to do with the role of the landed men in English life in a much more general sense, and represents a current reinter-pretational convergence. It is that the landed ...”

“... a Columbus who was both prophet and profiteer. The lesson is salutary: Columbus’s religion may have started as an affectation before it became an intense conviction. He was, after all, a professional salesman and natural rhetorician, who had an infallible trick of telling potential backers what they wanted to hear. He had thoroughly rumbled the ...”

“... to lead public opinion – rather like Bill Clinton. Although conceived before 11 September, both Richard Carwardine and Daniel Farber’s books have at least one eye on the present. Carwardine focuses on Lincoln’s relationship to different kinds of power – political, military and moral, and the power of public opinion and religious enthusiasm in an ...”

“... better than it looks, and on the other, that Nazi architecture is profoundly bad, however good it may look. When he was young, Krier argued that it was the melancholy duty of every architect of principle to give up any idea of building at all. ‘A responsible architect cannot possibly build today … Building can only mean a greater or smaller degree of ...”

“... He was a finely ironic self-dramatist, too, scheduling the first trial of Airship No. 2 for 11 May 1899 – the Feast of the Ascension. Paris, unsurprisingly, adored him. In 1901, at the height of his fame, a newspaper described him as the city’s ‘god’, and noted the homophony between his name and those of Porthos and Athos. Milliners created a ...”

“... In the closing stages of Richard Ben Cramer’s biography of Joe DiMaggio there is an exchange between the baseball legend and a man called Cappy Harada for whom DiMaggio had done a bit of business. The episode is undated in the book, but took place some time before the San Francisco earthquake of 1989, at which time DiMaggio was 74 ...”

“... I was in Los Angeles this spring on the day Richard Feynman died. The next morning I saw a banner lowered from the top of the tower block which stands in the middle of the Caltech campus. It read: ‘WE LOVE YOU DICK.’ The obituary of Feynman in the LA Times was awed and affectionate. It listed his achievements – his work in physics, the Nobel Prize it earned him and his work on the nuclear bomb ...”

“... the law. And, having lived lives generally presumed to have been even shadier than they were, they may well be immortalised as builders of temples of high culture. An authorised biography has now appeared of an English dealer of recent memory, Robert Fraser, 1937-86. His chequered career, terminated by Aids, lasted as long as it did only because of subsidies ...”