“... that has eclipsed its progenitor: Wallace out-Pynchons Pynchon, and his third book, Infinite Jest, may well be the first novel to out-Gravity’s Rainbow Gravity’s Rainbow.If nothing else, the success of Infinite Jest is proof that the Great American Hype Machine can still work wonders, in terms of sales. The novel has moved some 60,000 copies and racked up ...”

“... of its own dynamic or the causes of its own crises’. While the turn to ‘British history’ may be motivated by waning English confidence, however, many Irish and Scottish historians interpret it as a form of intellectual colonialism. Having dismantled Whig and Marxist explanations of political change in England, revisionists like Conrad Russell make ...”

“... the doctors who supported the ‘new German science of healing’ at a meeting in Nuremberg in May 1935 did so because they opposed what they called ‘alienation from nature’. By the time David Brower turned up, a large segment of the Western world was ready for a practical and friendly philosophy prepared to make the best of technology and human ...”

“... in her father’s world, competing with girlfriends, work and any other yet unborn children he may father. With mother it’s easier: when Mary finds herself pregnant by a sweet but useless hippy boyfriend, Jane (12 by now) announces that she doesn’t want a little brother, and Mary obediently has an abortion. We’re told Jane cherishes her guilt, years ...”

“... with a method for determining the number of molecules in a given volume of air. While this may now sound rather quaint, before 1905 the existence of atoms and molecules was not taken for granted. This Brownian motion paper is one of the most frequently cited scientific publications of the 20th century, since the theory has many applications, ranging ...”

“... own suggestion that ‘to give it a more modern air, the title of Belles Lettres might be added’ may support Robert Burns’s acidulous verdict that ‘Dr Blair is merely an astonishing proof of what industry and application can do,’ and ill-tempered shades more recently departed would surely agree. But others in this volume and elsewhere are at pains to ...”

“... they were not tortured: they held very different beliefs about the supernatural. Confessions may be tainted by having been extracted through torture, but the verbatim record of interrogations can still tell us a good deal about the beliefs, and (as Lyndal Roper has shown) the psychic dramas, of the accused. Of the dozen books discussed here, Clark’s ...”

“... Victims of Oppression, Violence and War, and then dropped at sea at the site of the sinking. I may have missed something, but the wreath-laying seemed to take place almost unnoticed behind a press of tourists, without announcement or microphones. Neither the sinking nor the commemorative wreath was mentioned during the service. The stress was on ...”

“... and declarations of love and piety, Margaret Blagge eventually became Margaret Godolphin on 16 May 1675, in a marriage so secret that not even her platonic friend Evelyn was told about it until the following April. Even then it was not Margaret herself but her sister who let the news slip. Evelyn’s diary for the period during which her marriage was still ...”

“... features, and what he has said in earlier pages or volumes has to be recapitulated since it may now lie so far back along the trail. Both purposes are served by repeated perorations about LBJ forcing through the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which finally gave all blacks the vote, and about the canniness with which he foresaw Southern resistance in Congress ...”

“... be a victim of Fascism, I shall take pen in hand and write a chronicle of a city. Clearly, Vilna may also be captured. The Germans will turn the city Fascist. Jews will go into the Ghetto – I shall record it all. My chronicle must see, must hear and must become the mirror and the conscience of the great catastrophe and of the hard times. (Given this ...”

“... his memoirs as a way of publicising a new cause: the unification of Italy. When he heard in May 1860 that Garibaldi had sailed for Sicily, Dumas changed his plans and followed in his schooner, the Emma. But not with all convenient speed. He missed the taking of Palermo, having dallied at Marseille to throw a party and stopped for a day in Sardinia to ...”

“... for more than two thousand years, are to return to their homeland. Few hereabouts believe it, but may wish it. Do let your friend know what you hear about this matter, and what you think. For my part, I cannot put any faith in this news as long as it is not reported by trustworthy men from the city of Constantinople, which is most of all concerned in this ...”

“... pointing out that they were fighting a just war and that in such circumstances ‘the moral sense may only with difficulty be tuned to the lot of any particular individual, which can seem of minuscule significance.’ What magnetically draws his attention is the unfamiliar term – ‘Syrians’ – by which British officials and documents distinguish his ...”

“... any messages of inquiry, until one day he is found to be quietly making history all on his own. It may turn out to have done him no good, but his case remains a salutary warning to anyone who persists in writing the history of Africa without the Africans. Any explication of the ending of Lisbon’s colonial wars has to be centred on the coup of 25 April ...”