“... panels is crucial. Each is 35 inches high and a little short of 16 inches wide; originally they may have been a few inches taller top and bottom. The tallness and narrowness seem meant to amplify the idea of elevation in panels one and two – Terrestrial Paradise is followed by a scene in which the elect are lofted, almost sucked, into a kind of celestial ...”

“... teacher at Cranborne Chase, who was bent over her needle. ‘My shroud,’ she replied.) This may have been the reason they were so unpleasant to the children in their care. Or perhaps this was how they found fulfilment. ‘If I was your mother, I’d live abroad,’ the matron at Beaufront said to a girl called Amanda. ‘Jennifer is more a liability ...”

“... motive: money troubles and possibly a grudge against academia (Sabar posits that his original mark may not have been King but Osing, whom Fritz was still bitterly denouncing thirty years later). And perhaps that really is all there was to it. Certainly one wants at times to shake off this clammy individual, to say: pah, sociopath, case closed, not ...”

“... Otte stresses Britain’s alarm at this Russian activity. He speculates that the Foreign Office may have been inching towards a new pattern of European relationships, thinking that the Russian entente had had its day. If so, this was spectacularly bad timing. Certainly Germany hoped that it could exploit the Foreign Office’s anxieties about Russia, and ...”

“... far beyond their own shorelines, and the possession of islands, even islets like the Senkakus, may allow for a better claim to what would otherwise be treated as open ocean.The seas have often been thought of as ‘lawless’. But Bosco, who has an American law school background, contends that an international legal regime for the oceans has been in place ...”

“... and elected representatives. Whatever Biden’s approval ratings, his warnings in this speech may have helped to set the stage for the Democrats’ strong showing; so, too, did his success in restoring a modicum of civility to American political life.Why were​ supporters of the Democrats – including seasoned election-watchers – so easily persuaded ...”

“... its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, committed to the armed struggle. But whatever hopes the ANC may have entertained of building a patron-client relationship with Buthelezi could not have lasted long: it soon became clear that he was building a wholly independent power base. The Soweto uprising of 1976 caught the ANC badly off-guard. The events owed nothing ...”

“... from whose influence the composition of the Arcadia marks a break. But while Sidney may indeed have wearied of Languet’s tutelage, a suggestion tellingly made, the debt to his ideas persisted. What interests Duncan-Jones about ‘Ister Bank’ is not its politics but a more straightforward feature which other critics have, it is ...”

“... believed they could sell Gorbachev the idea that he needed to have his way cleared, and that he may well have encouraged this view before the coup took place, only to realise after the event that his acquiescence would mean he was their political prisoner. Yeltsin has some sharp things to say about the August coup itself. His acute descriptions of the ...”

“... the news failed, for essentially bureaucratic reasons, to reach the New Zealand Police. This may or may not be true. Either way, no doubt MI6 enjoyed the discomfiture of the French and the French, knowing they were being laughed at, hated it. As a consequence of the Greenpeace affair, the DGSE now has its fourth ...”

“... are some people whom we envy not because they are rich or handsome or successful, although they may be any or all of these, but because everything they are and do seems to be all of a piece, so that even if they wanted to they could not be or do otherwise.’ Marianne Moore is a case in point: her poetry is packed with moral nostrums and eccentric ...”

“... than of intellectualist pondering. Truth cannot be abstracted from an action so that its validity may be tested by other actions in the form of logic or science. ‘The truth of an idea,’ he says in Pragmatism, is not a stagnant property inherent to it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a ...”

“... the Drugs Division of the Home Office by whom the idea of using cannabis as a subject for research may have been thought a tall story. Todd was now so obviously a coming man that jobs were offered almost as a matter of course, and at the age of 30 he was made Professor of Chemistry and head of the chemical laboratories of the University of Manchester. Here he ...”

“... his main achievements – his remarks on the links between Protestantism and capitalism – may be wrong-headed, they have been a great stimulating force. But there were weaknesses in the later Weber: above all, a willingness to spill out words, knowing, German-fashion, that they would be received as messages from on high. It was also a weakness of ...”

“... one type of beauty which he appreciated all too well. The bachelor don is today extinct. There may still be bachelors among the fellows of colleges, but the society in which they played such a distinctive role has vanished. The Royal Commission of 1882 had recommended that dons, like professors and heads of houses, should be free to marry, and amid lively ...”