“... intake of meat. (While preparing for Christ’s return Mrs White’s protégé, the nutritionist John Kellogg, developed a special vegetarian diet of processed corn, transforming Battle Creek, Michigan, where the Seventh-Day Adventists had their headquarters, into the Breakfast Food Capital of the World.) Like Mormonism, Seventh-Day Adventism is now a ...”

“... prolific and, until this centenary, largely forgotten American writer of sea tales called Morgan Robertson published Futility, or the Wreck of the ‘Titan’. Fourteen years later he cashed in by changing the tonnage of the fictional ship to nearer that of the real one, and cutting ‘futility’ from his title. ‘She was the largest craft afloat and the ...”

“... A story, as John Burrow says of his own History of Histories, is selective. It looks forward ‘to its later episodes or its eventual outcome for its criteria of relevance’. Hence a difficulty: The impulse to write history has nourished much effective narrative, and narrative – above all in Homer – was one of the sources of history as a genre ...”

“... the outer firth.The bigger and more glamorous yards lay upriver at Dumbarton and Clydebank, where John Brown’s built the Queens for Cunard, and inside Glasgow’s city boundaries, where five or six companies on both banks (among them Harland & Wolff, Fairfield and Barclay Curle) gave Auden his ‘glade of cranes’. Downriver, the engine works and slipways ...”

“... loomed large in 17th-century thought. Millenarians and Messianists like Isaac La Peyrère, John Dury and Peter Serrarius expected the recall of the Jews to Palestine any minute, where they would rebuild the Temple and set up a government. Arguments about whether they would return as Jews or as converts to Christianity were common. Menasseh ben Israel ...”

“... devolution as a plan to secure the Union; put another way, in the partisan words of George Robertson, it would ‘kill nationalism stone-dead’. However, others begged to differ. Not only the Tories, but also Labour’s open devo-sceptic, Tam Dalyell, contended that home rule and the resulting potential for friction between Edinburgh and Westminster ...”

“... searching for the kindness of strangers on Clapham Common. The Director-General of the BBC, Sir John Birt, was knighted by Tony Blair and worked with and befriended Mandelson at London Weekend Television in the early Eighties. LWT executives became millionaires when a share option lottery in 1993 fell well for them. (Among the lucky LWT ...”

“... paying the highest price in the loss of the lives of our young soldiers – almost alone. I’m John Kerry and I approved this message. In a world of instant projections and medium-is-the-message contemplations, commentary on the presidential race of 2004 might finish right there: Kerry’s style is downbeat, America-blaming, slightly depressing, while the ...”

“... the help he got from Gamlin. Forbes wrote to him at the BBC – at the time Forbes’s name was John Theobald Clarke – and Gamlin wrote back, telling Forbes that his letter was so extraordinary he would have to meet him. When they met Gamlin said it would be necessary for him to change his name. ‘Another young actor, ahead of me,’ Forbes wrote years ...”

“... are predominantly Muslim. The Government repeatedly refers to Serb atrocities which, George Robertson teaches us, Europe has not seen the like of ‘since the Middle Ages’. Isuppose if you overlook the period 1914-45, he does have a point. Maybe it is this barbarism that excludes Kosovo from Europe? In fact, Kosovo, like anywhere else in the ...”

“... also includes prominent Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives, all of whom believe Israel’s rebirth is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and support its expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they believe, would be ...”

“... for Israel, reputedly ‘good’ with black people, he is moreover young and once shook hands with John F. Kennedy. At the bar of the Sheraton Wayfarer in Manchester, the HQ of the travelling press corps, most correspondents report that their editors only want good news about the new consensus candidate. And, generally, that’s what they have been getting and ...”

“... Suffering from depression, he was analysed by the perceptive but corrupt psychotherapist John Layard, who went to bed with him; his father paid for the analysis, and Layard, when Redgrove explained the Game to him, said simply: ‘That’s your mother.’ With its epitaph from Baudelaire – ‘C’est elle! Noire et pourtant ...”

“... more or less the practice of editors ever since. The six drafts were, however, printed together in John Murray’s edition of 1896, and Womersley has taken the lead in insisting that this is the source the student of Gibbon must use. He is right; but Murray’s volume has never been reprinted, and we need a new edition, whether electronic or ...”

“... will be received by bullets.’ I heard that the president said to the television evangelist Pat Robertson: ‘Oh, no, we’re not going to have any casualties.’ I heard the president say that he had not consulted his father about the coming war: ‘You know he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal ...”