“... for millions of dollars in political contributions and campaign loans.’ That’s what it means to move to the middle ground, of course. The fabled Republican negative campaigners may have a problem with exploiting it, even so. I can’t see them choosing to emphasise how soft money finances hard politics. In this, as in many issues between the ...”

“... in the ennui of being highly-educated and having nothing to do. Clearly, writing was, in part, a means to independence, and yet it took years, and the interference of an uncle, to effect even a partial move away. In fact, she can’t properly be said to have left home at all: home left her in 1925 when her mother died. Jane Emery is unemphatic about the hold ...”

“... another of her blows at the practice of trying to settle international disputes peacefully, by means of the United Nations. UN mediation may not always have gone very well, but it seems a lot more promising than competitive appeals to international law, followed or preceded by bloodshed. But the debate, as I have implied, was not all sweetness and ...”

“... bore – he is so insistent as to be a positive fatigue.’ This tart commentary was provided by David Alexander Edward Lindsay, better-known (after he succeeded his father in 1913) as the 27th Earl of Crawford, and probably best-known as the tenth Earl of Balcarres, a junior title that did not bar him from the House of Commons. To unravel his pedigree, as ...”

“... to be faced with an increasingly volatile and sceptical electorate. For this reason, it is by no means clear whether the growth of new parties in Western Europe heralds a process of realignment – such as occurred in Britain in the Twenties – or a process of dealignment whereby parties cease to be able to rely upon particular socio-economic groups for ...”

“... it all seems to sustain is an argument that the events of ’56 did not need an organisation, or means of communication, or plans. ‘The Reform Communist intellectuals [significant distinction] – the writers and journalists provided the least leadership of all; they were the nobodies of the uprising.’ Instead, a ‘Jewish writer and Communist’ like ...”

“... This is the book of the exhibition. Modern interest in Arcimboldo dates from his inclusion, by means of enlarged photographs, in the exhibition ‘Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism’, organised by Alfred Barr at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1936. Margaret Barr remembers: Alfred and I were in Paris in 1931, going around to the galleries. We went ...”

“... stories as words are at conveying pictures. An observer who had not already heard the story of David and Goliath would see in the Speculum picture nothing more specific than a king who has just cut off the head of a giant (the latter identified not so much by his size as by his club). Indeed, even if one does already know a story, it is by no ...”

“... with accounts of visits to Adolf Grünbaum in Pittsburgh, to Richard Swinburne in Oxford, to David Deutsch in Headington, to John Leslie in Canada, to Derek Parfit, again in Oxford. He meets Roger Penrose in New York, has phone conversations with Steven Weinberg and John Updike. These conversations become a way of evoking possibilities as much as seeking ...”

“... devolved government in Northern Ireland’. Wishful thinking, Sinn Féin says. All this means that there will be no Northern Ireland Executive when the twentieth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement is marked at the beginning of April. The Clintons, Tony Blair, George Mitchell and Bertie Ahern were all expected to make an appearance. Recently it ...”

“... as well as more representative of the state of 16th-century history: Natalie Zemon Davis, David Cressy, Eamon Duffy. More privately, there is the story he tells us in his prologue about his acceding, if sheepishly, to the unspoken wishes of his dead father by saying Kaddish for him. Which seems a more human response than his refusal, recorded in the ...”

“... There was a press conference on the 19th and the public picked up the 1918 connection on the 20th. David Sencer, Director of the Center for Disease Control at Atlanta, Georgia, prepared a memorandum called ‘Swine Influenza: action’. It went via the secretaries of health, education and welfare to President Ford. On 24 March a ‘Blue Riband Panel’ of ...”

“... from Bunting, Montgomery published four collections by Roy Fisher, one by Ian Hamilton Finlay, David Jones’s The Tribune’s Visitation, an early collection by Christopher Middleton, and three by Lee Harwood. The publishing provenance of an outsider poet like Harwood can tell you a lot about his work: Fulcrum, Oasis Books, Pig Press, Galloping ...”

“... treatment and the public discourse has already been charted by Andrew Scull, Michel Foucault and David Rothman. Roger Smith’s contribution is to show that the legal conceptions of mens rea and free will provided the basis for resisting medical claims to hegemoney, not only within the courtroom, but in ‘public opinion’ at large. The ...”

“... to the Rock the Vote campaign (the rock’n’roll initiative to re-enfranchise youth), which means 400,000 more 18-to-25-year-olds voting this year than in 1992. An apolitical organisation, but helped along by the rocking Noel and Damon, who have, well, given the nod already, it’s no less partisan in practice than Billy Bragg’s Red Wedge. Rodol’s ...”