“... Bill Clinton, then a leading congressman and finally Obama’s chief of staff. Some felt that he may have been headed for the White House in his own right. But he has no regrets. Who would want to be president these days? He thinks the federal government is where good ideas go to die. Cities like Chicago are where it’s at. It just takes mayors like him to ...”

“... and hold our empire by the tenure of the sword. For this neither the nation, nor individuals, may be in strict propriety responsible, because the current of events, and not their own ambitious plans, swept the India Company onwards to the position which they now hold; yet the facts are as I have stated them to be, and we cannot escape from them. Indeed we ...”

“... the disease so lightly that they are unaware of it – and unaware of the lasting damage the virus may have done to the motor neurones which control their muscles. In Cork, a compact city of some 75,000 inhabitants, the total of those affected must have been at least 50,000. And all those attacked became for a time carriers of the infection. In August that ...”

“... and the bass playing.’ Some original fans of the young Scritti Politti and post-punk generally may have equally mixed feelings, for different reasons, about their undomesticated, once obscure music being tamed and repackaged in compilations. Compressed into an hour, the shocks and stop-start pace of these bands’ careers lose some of their allure. The ...”

“... content. Insofar as form and language detain him, they detain him as questions of ideology. It may be for this reason that he seems to prefer drama to poetry and fiction, and that he praises ‘the particularly rapid progress of English drama’ in this period. (Drama, being more openly political than either fiction or poetry, is more progressive.) Just as ...”

“... through Christopher Hughes’s Kripke: Names, Necessity and Identity, I am no longer puzzled. That may sound as though I’m intending to dispraise the book, but to the contrary; I think it’s a fine piece of work in lots of ways. To begin with, the topic is well chosen. By pretty general consent, Kripke’s writings (including, especially, Naming and ...”

“... Astronaut Scott shoves Astronaut Oates off the steps of the module – ‘I am going up now. I may be gone for some time’ – and blasts off. For Dorothy, this is the end of all romance (‘Goodbye spoony Juney Moon’): the men are unworthy of the Moon. Opening in January 1972 at the Old Vic, Jumpers came two and a half years after the Apollo 11 ...”

“... school linked with mine was always known simply as the Boy from Chick. The hanging incident was in May. Two months later, the press arrived again. On Tuesday 13 July, the Metropolitan Police raided a house in Lees Holm, a mixed area between mostly Asian Savile Town and mostly white Thornhill Edge. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the 7 July bombers, had ...”

“... wheaten bread is not the staff of life.’ Crookes’s apocalyptic vision was widely credited and may indirectly have inspired Haber’s work. The production of cheap synthetic fertilisers permitted by the Haber-Bosch process was a vital ingredient in the sevenfold increase in the world’s food supply during the course of the 20th century and the almost ...”

“... Fund for Population Activities. The expatriate’s lack of roots has haunted him. Even though he may owe to it much of his literary awareness and sensitivity, it formed an unstable and dangerous basis for embarking on Mrs Gandhi’s biography. He came to his subject with excessive commitment. This was not a matter of political allegiance shaped by a rough ...”

“... which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may be from what may not be characterised as “scientific” ’, and his illustrations of how such an apparatus can suddenly be cast aside, helps flesh out Kuhn’s notion of ‘paradigm’. One difference between Kuhn and ...”

“... and generally be a bit Nazi Megastructures and ‘Where’s his poppy?’ Left-of-centre academics may also be put off by traditional military history’s penchant for narrative and its beguiling mono-perspectives. In its purely operational and strategic guise, military history is often dull, amassing punishing quantities of trainspotterish detail. All this ...”

“... Capital today is going to be vulnerable to criticism from a vast community of scholars. They may be praised for what they get right but they will certainly be taken to task for what they get wrong. It is a thankless business, not least because all translations eventually become obsolete. This is an insight that any historical materialist will ...”

“... rescued. Compared to the one and a half million children who died during the Holocaust, this may seem insignificant, but it was something. A similar plan was rejected by the US Congress.Things moved quickly. Within days of the vote, the BBC broadcast a call for foster homes and the Movement for the Care of Children (later renamed the Refugee Children’s ...”

“... unconcerned about his lack of heirs. While he was devoted to his first wife, Anne of Bohemia, he may not have desired her sexually. His favourite and probable lover, Robert de Vere, also stayed childless through two marriages. Richard may have taken perverse comfort in his failure to beget a successor because it made him ...”