“... a war whose technology was even more impersonally brutal than his own military prowess. There you may still look down on the face of one of the earliest military tomb effigies in Europe. If we are familiar with the medieval monuments which now jostle each other in churches, we tend to forget how startling and novel this figure of a recumbent knight would have ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... painters, Velázquez was the only one who, to be fully appreciated, had to be seen in Spain. Richard Ford, in his Handbook for Travellers in Spain, had made the same point two years earlier. He conceded that Murillo was more successful ‘in delineations of female beauty, the ideal, and holy subjects’, but Velázquez’s ‘representation of ...”

“... a household and be a wife which he wrote for her during their engagement. He adored his first son, Richard, a prodigy who (if we believe the diary) could recite the Psalms and read Greek at an age when most children today are thinking about Lego. But Richard died when he was only five, and Evelyn found it hard to transfer ...”

“... affronted national pride: ‘The English like to think they like to laugh at themselves. This may have been true once when there was no apprehension that the Sun might one day Set. But it is not true today. The good ship Britannia is waterlogged in a shark-infested sea. Don’t rock the boat’. I think now, as I thought then, that this was well over the ...”

“... mere ‘hack’ before he became a poet, as some have suggested (indeed his critical biography of Richard Jefferies, Wilson argues, is ‘a classic of the genre’); nor was he ‘grindingly poor’ (‘his earnings between 1906 and 1912 were about the equivalent of a university professor’s’); but ‘perhaps the most serious distortion of the Thomas ...”

“... unskilled role with as much speed and efficiency as they could muster. The Front was, as Richard Rhodes put it in The Making of the Atom Bomb, an industrial operation for the manufacture of corpses. Disney and Kroc were great admirers of Ford (as was Lenin) and saw assembly lines as the embodiment of efficiency, order and consistency. These lines ...”

“... and idolatrous popery.A preliminary sally in July 1643, when the Parliamentarian commander Colonel Richard Norton had expected ‘much spoil and little opposition’, had ended in failure. It was the first sign that taking Basing House would involve more than strolling through the parkland and bashing down the door, and should have made Waller less sanguine ...”

“... the last, to employ the information dump as a literary technique. But this is some dump.Trevelyan may well have conceived of Two Thousand Million Man-Power as the sort of novel of ideas Bennett would never have attempted. There’s a clue in the title. The phrase occurs in Ian Colvin’s ‘Social Survey of the World To-Day’, a chapter in the eighth and ...”

“... argued that African Americans – ‘especially if we are potential writers’ – may be ‘more than ordinarily concerned’ with the associations their names carry with them.Everett was born in Georgia and raised in South Carolina. He studied with the logician Howard Pospesel at the University of Miami, where he read Frege, Wittgenstein and ...”

“... and found he was good at it, meticulous and with a keen eye for detail. Working with the printer Richard Clay and Sons, he was able to match all details of the original pamphlets, with the exception of the paper stock. His versions, he boasted, were ‘as exact a representation as it has been found possible’, with each ‘printer’s error, dropped letter ...”

“... a Western consensus developed that the intervention was something best forgotten. Indeed, both Richard Nixon in 1972 and Margaret Thatcher twelve years later succeeded so well in this that they were able to assure Soviet interlocutors that their countries had never been at war with each other.There was plenty of reason to see the intervention as nasty ...”

“... immoraliste, E.T.A. (Amadeus) Hoffmann, Byron, Kierkegaard (the aesthetic v. the ethical) and Richard Strauss, to Shaw and Eric Linklater. The sociological aspects of the ever-interesting topic are not neglected. Taking his tip from the 354 acknowledged bastards of Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, Roy Porter paints a picture of ...”

“... Cromwell gets 21 lines to himself plus a separate entry under Tudor Revolution in Government. This may indicate the administrative path to editorial favour, for A.V. Dicey’s academic writings on the 19th century state are rewarded with an entry of nine lines, the same as Lord John Russell who was merely in office at the time. This is three lines less than ...”

“... Cukor, who preceded Fleming on Oz, had left. Vidor replaced Fleming. (The first director on Oz was Richard Thorpe.) Rushdie’s argument becomes somewhat confused on the question of auteur credit. He makes much of geometric and other compositional details in the Kansas sequences, neglects to mention that these were directed by Vidor, yet claims the film has no ...”