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“... and a reader who wants detailed accounts of Ptolemy’s Syntaxis or Epictetus’s Manual may find them elsewhere. Not, however, in the Cambridge History. And here a critic may find room to carp. In at least two respects the book is conservative. Literary scholars prefer poetry to prose, and they prefer the ...”

“... on the Austrian resistance; but he has done little else. Another account of the controversy – Richard Evans’s In Hitler’s Shadow – is better informed, and more perceptive. Professor Evans shows in abundantly documented detail how the arguments the embattled historians are advancing ‘are derived, consciously or unconsciously, from the propaganda of ...”

“... as a model for development. It is as if she believes that, whereas our own pursuit of growth may have had unfortunate environmental consequences, it has broadly achieved what was expected of it, and whatever social problems Western societies may have come from other causes. It is difficult to see what supports this ...”

“... schooldays, of how his ‘Gaelic goofiness’ was redeemed by the insights of the Jewish outsider, Richard Alpert, later known as Ram Dass, guru. Leary spent a lot of time getting himself expelled from institutions, and forcing himself into exile, or, as an alternative, turning into a Hollywood prophet for psychedelic drugs. (The other exponent of the virtues ...”

“... GPA and Jewish antecedents. Some sperm firms offer discounts for the holiday season (‘Though it may not be the most traditional gift …’), and put up money-shots of their ‘donor of the month’ online. At the other end of the life cycle, as Sandel tells us, ‘viatical’ firms in the US take on unwanted life insurance policies en bloc from seniors in ...”

“... church. A mile or so beyond looms a larger sight that Rodinsky was spared: the 52 floors of Richard Seifert’s Natwest Tower, double-decker lifts, automatic window-washing facilities and all. Here again was the characteristic frisson of the zone of transition, where different worlds rub up against one another, languages intersect on every corner and ...”

“... minds in their writers, as do troubled families or systems of belief: but while being so troubled may be a powerful incitement to literary production, it may equally get in the way of real achievement. Writers can find themselves facing a dilemma, a choice between fidelity to their own passionate confusions and the possibly ...”

“... the end of the Civil War, his father was denounced to the authorities by his best friend) may lie behind this mistrustful disposition. But it is also tempting to see in his aggrieved scepticism something of the straitened epistemological circumstances of contemporary fiction, many of whose practitioners feel as little able to believe in omniscient ...”

“... friend of a friend who came in a couple of days a week to open the post and deposit the money, in May 1996. A month later, Omidyar quit his job at General Magic to work on AuctionWeb full-time. In August, Jeff Skoll, another friend of a friend, who had an MBA from Stanford, came on board: Omidyar needed someone to work with him who knew how to put together a ...”

“... by Waterhouse’s concern with the pedigrees of the painters he discussed, men like Thomas Jones, Richard Wilson and Sawrey Gilpin, all of whom are adjudged to be of ‘good family’, and Sir James Thornhill, who came from ‘good Dorset stock’, a phrase more at home in a book on country cooking than in a serious work of scholarship. Why pedigree mattered ...”

“... Negotiating the commercial treaty of 1860 with France, Richard Cobden, he later revealed, felt ‘humiliated’ by the contrast between the rational system of measurement in force across the Channel and the weird complication of its British counterpart. Metrication and decimalisation would not only smooth the conquering path of British commerce but contribute to the harmony of nations ...”

“... about sound’. That Welles was a self-conscious tyrant was crucial to his achievement. It may also explain his ambivalence towards acolytes and admirers, what Thomson calls his ‘dread of the thing most desired’. ‘I’m a king actor,’ Welles admitted in a late interview, ‘maybe a bad one, but that’s what I am, you see. And I have to play ...”

“... by conflating it with inventive variants on more traditional forms of fantasy, of the kind we may associate with Hoffmann or Gogol. The man who loses his head has also met the devil an hour or so earlier – a busy day for a man described as being ‘unaccustomed to unusual happenings’. When one of the devil’s assistants says to a young woman that he ...”

“... a decade before but had since abandoned. The LCS was never very large: at its most successful, it may never have contained more than three thousand active, paid-up members, though many more thousands must have attended a few meetings, even joined it briefly, then hurriedly left or slowly drifted away. In bad times its membership dwindled away to a few ...”

“... fought and wrote his major poems, were a small proportion of the British Army as a whole, and it may be that their early deployment in 1940 immunised them against a general political infection. I doubt this, however: not even Spike Milligan reads like that. When British forces in Cairo held a mock election under the auspices of the Army Educational Command ...”