“... book in rejoinder. It is going to be a long time before a better book of its kind appears than Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. The elegance of its style, the easy and effective deployment of historical scholarship, and, above all, the ability to distinguish the central threads of recent debate from the side-issues and to follow ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... autobiographical papers, Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman?, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman, describes being piqued by an article in Science about how well bloodhounds can smell. Feynman hates not being best, and so he took time off from inventing the atom bomb (he was working at Los Alamos) to run an experiment. He had his wife handle ...”

“... Office, this is by no means a triumphalist volume in celebration of the Conservative Party. It may indeed be the Left which has most to learn from it. The perspective it adopts is very much that of our own day, starting from the premise that the Tories have been in power for the last 16 years – and that this is broadly in keeping with their performance ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with the express purpose of creating the conditions for the sustenance of life. While it may seem that where some see God, Lovelock sees Gaia (‘Gaia looks after us’), he doesn’t say Gaia is God. He has never claimed that Gaia is sentient, or benevolent, or anything so obviously woo-woo as that. Rather, he maintains that all the evidence ...”

“... briefly uniting the king with most of his domestic enemies. The revolutionary constitution of 3 May 1791 brought radical reform, Enlightenment ideas and – at last – coherent central authority to the country. This astonishing and brilliant revival of independence and creative energy is the subject of ...”

“... institution once held her in his hands, made casts of her body, and articulated her skeleton. They may be intended as evidence, but they look more like trophies; either way, they are invitations to work backwards, to find out what the child’s life was, and how, in death, she came to be here.She was exhibited as Miss Crachami, the Sicilian Fairy, or Sicilian ...”

“... high command when it conveyed Lenin back to Russia in that sealed train. In the Watergate affair, Richard Nixon scored not one but two own goals: first, by organising a burglary which could produce only minimal gain for the Republicans if it worked but would destroy him if it went wrong; then by secretly recording his conversations in the White House in the ...”

“... has nothing to do with air or water, and that accent is only part of the story. In different ways, Richard Burton and Aneurin Bevan (Beaverbrook’s ‘Bollinger Bolshevik’) were also champion putters-on. So, in a rather minor key, were at least half the members of my mother’s extended family. In a putting-it-on competition between Roy Jenkins and my ...”