“... Rybczynski deplores the damage done by the ‘socialist post-war governments in England, Germany, Holland and the Scandinavian countries’ which responded favourably to the ‘left-leaning rhetoric of the Modern school’. But before this momentary engagement with the question of public housing disrupts his art-historical survey, he quickly jumps back into ...”

“... James Angleton​ , chief of counterintelligence at the CIA for twenty years, was not the ideal spy. The ideal spy is a mouse-coloured blur in the crowd, someone like George Smiley, described by his wife as ‘breathtakingly ordinary’. There was nothing ordinary about Angleton. Once experienced, his history, his appearance, his manner, and his stubborn refusal to be clear were all indelible ...”

“... the aftermath of empire in the lives of the peoples most immediately affected by Britain, France, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Russia and, now, the United States. Why is it acceptable to discuss reparations for the victims of genocide in some instances but not in others? Should Africans in the Caribbean and the Americas be ignored when they continue to draw ...”

“... judge by websites located there. But the best pieces are sent to Europe, where shops in Germany, Holland and elsewhere offer them openly. In London, formerly the key market, government action has halted the trade – for now. The same is true of the US, which had the most active buyers until a presidential order put a stop to it. Looting in Iraq has a long ...”

“... at Lyme Regis on 11 June 1685, to begin his rebellion against his uncle, the new Catholic monarch, James II, Defoe left his young wife, Mary, whom he had married eighteen months before, to join the rebels. Novak notes that some of his former schoolmates at Morton’s Academy lost their lives in the rebellion, but he does not name them. This is a pity, because ...”

“... in the archaeological record. Among the Bog People of Northern Europe is a pair found in 1904 in Holland in a carefully arranged and well-preserved, if soggy, 2000-year-old embrace. They were immediately nicknamed ‘Darby and Joan’, until closer examination revealed that Joan had a beard, and they were renamed ‘Darby and John’. The main ...”

“... find being made a public spectacle so delicious, and it is remarkable that he sent William Holland to Newgate for issuing the pamphlets of Tom Paine, but not for publishing Richard Newton’s scandalous political caricatures. Newton, a brilliant cartoonist who died at the age of 21, is the subject of an exhibition and catalogue from the Whitworth Art ...”

“... where it was becoming commercially successful. The city which had brought together de Kooning from Holland, Rothko from Russia and Oregon, Hoffman from Germany, Gorky from Russia, would now take its profit. The magazines, the newspapers, the galleries, the curators, the collectors, the critics, the whole network by which reputations are made, was in gear. The ...”

“... boasted with evident relish, could rival the DNB in scale, scope or speed. Austria, Germany, Holland and Sweden had all initiated similar schemes: but they had taken conspicuously longer, produced conspicuously less, and were all conspicuously incomplete. Moreover, by narrowing its scope from universal to British and Imperial biography, the Dictionary ...”

“... negotiation and misunderstanding that led up to the publication of Emile, not from a safe haven in Holland, but in Paris. As if that were not enough, the discussion of civil religion in The Social Contract followed the line taken much earlier by Machiavelli in declaring that Christianity was a terrible foundation for republican politics. Indeed, the chapter on ...”

“... goes, from two of her former lovers – the Crown Prince of Germany and the Prime Minister of Holland – were of no use. ‘Please note that I am not French,’ she said in her final statement, ‘and that I reserve the right to cultivate any relations that may please me. The war is not sufficient reason to stop me from being a cosmopolitan.’ After her ...”

“... epigenetics faded from view. With​ the discovery of the structure of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson in the 1950s, there was a renewed conviction among biologists – especially the physicists and engineers turned biologists like Crick – that what was needed was a ruthless reductionism. It was immediately recognised that DNA’s helical structure ...”

“... Sarah Waters, Madeline Miller), classicists (Robin Lane Fox, Bettany Hughes), historians (Tom Holland), who salute her muscular resurrections of the classical world, and gay men who see her as a pioneer in her writing about homosexual relationships. Along with hundreds of other gay men, many of them closeted, the writer and classicist Daniel ...”

“... Montgomery Wetmore took home Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters, which Lamb’s friend James Kenney had not only borrowed but taken to live with him at Versailles (Lamb had to make a special trip to recover it). The ‘Conant’ who picked up Cavendish’s World’s Olio was probably the philologist Thomas Jefferson Conant. A Louisville china ...”

“... confident than ever in the object of his faith.’ Tried and tested, Cash comes forth as gold. In James Mangold’s much-hailed biopic, Walk the Line, the mythic retelling of Cash’s story is, naturally, Greek rather than Christian, Hollywood’s standard method being to take the legacy and the legends of the Greeks and to give them a little Christian twist ...”