“... billed as the first ‘authorised’ biography in twenty years. Chandler would be amused by his power to authorise a biography from beyond the grave, but probably not so amused by the promise of ‘new material’ about the private life of the author of the private eye. ‘Do you suppose,’ Chandler once admonished an aspiring author, ‘I became one of ...”

“... to the coal bunkers, number two boiler-room was quickly engulfed, causing a catastrophic loss of power. Moreover, the longitudinal bulkheads ensured that the water was not spread evenly across the ship, as on the Titanic, but confined to the starboard side. Hence the severe list. At this point Captain Turner’s failure to ensure that all the portholes were ...”

“... in Cambridge, who made not himselfe a disciple of Mr Andrewes.’ In 1586 he became chaplain to Henry Hastings, Third Earl of Huntingdon, the ‘Puritan Earl’ who, as president of the Council of the North, was commander-in-chief in England’s northern Catholic badlands, in the battle between popery and a beleaguered and pugilistic Elizabethan ...”

“... anthropologist looked so dispassionately on the spectacle of the ‘disappearing native’. Lewis Henry Morgan combined writing ethnography of the Seneca and the Sioux with legal and political activism on their behalf but, as Geroulanos points out, even he seemed to accept that the extermination of Native Americans was inevitable: they were ...”

“... into conformity or struck down by the gods of liberal outrage. But those gods don’t have the power they once did. He made it into Parliament in 2010 as Conservative MP for North East Somerset and has been there ever since, stiffening the already near-rigid sinews of the Faragist party within a party. His maiden speech in Parliament invoked ‘three great ...”

“... nation a punishment which they would never forget. The best-known exponent of this policy was Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of the Treasury, whose scheme to pastoralise Germany, stripping it of its industry and its power to create wealth, found some favour with Roosevelt. It found no favour at all with the British. Nor ...”

“... The labourer was worthy of his hire, and if that labour was reckoned to contribute to national power, social welfare and commercial profit, why shouldn’t scientists be richly rewarded? Why shouldn’t they do science in order to secure such rewards? It was physicists who first experienced a bump in their salaries and, for a few of them, an entrée to the ...”

“... art of fiction.’ This remark probably arose from his habitual disrespect for, or worry about, Henry James. The Ambassadors is given more attention in Aspects of the Novel than any other novel, except possibly Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs, though the intention is in neither case to praise or to admire; and the Commonplace Book contains mildly disparaging ...”

“... possible from all other nations’, so that America would emerge from the war as the sole nuclear power. Wellerstein thinks that these ‘unspecified “other nations” surely included the United Kingdom’, which had wound down its own Bomb project and seconded its nuclear scientists to the American programme. Practically from the outset, the Manhattan ...”

“... The effect is cumulative. Through a pile-up of detail, Suetonius explores the ways in which power was achieved (or seized), wielded, abused and lost by his subjects. He’s less interested in – or appears to have a weaker grasp of – wider historical currents than his contemporary Tacitus: no one would look to Suetonius for a structural account of ...”

“... offenders are to be sentenced, in recent years with increasing frequency. (Within two decades the power to suspend prison sentences was first given and then all but taken away by Parliament. Within two years the courts were first forbidden and then required to take an offender’s whole criminal record into account.) I have not heard it suggested that the ...”

“... just as grave a danger to American democracy as a President who accepts bribes from a foreign power. Appalled at the Republican attempt to embarrass Clinton by inviting the entire planet to take a gander through his bathroom window, ordinary citizens were also irked by the lack of a sense of proportion in the Republicans’ hyping of damage and danger to ...”

“... comparable to castration,’ Burroughs writes from Tangier in 1954. ‘You were given the power to love in order to use it, no matter what pain it may cause you. Buddhism frequently amounts to a form of psychic junk ... I may add that I have seen nothing from those California Vedantists but a lot of horse shit, and I denounce them without cavil, as a ...”

“... Union, as the case might be, for any access at all to the Continent. The victorious continental power, moreover, would have been free to demobilise significantly on land, thus releasing ample resources to strengthen its maritime forces. From then on, the collapse of Britain’s maritime security would have been only a question of time: the few years needed ...”

“... Carlos Williams he said that ‘even his good critical remarks sound as if they had been made by Henry Ford’; of Edith Sitwell’s then fashionable poems that they ‘sound as if Madame Blavatsky had written them for a Society of Latterday Druids’. In a sonnet series by Conrad Aiken ‘any similarity between the poems and reality is purely ...”