“... of Pervitin in the Blitzkrieg; he cites and quotes the work of historians such as Werner Pieper, Peter Steinkamp and Karl-Heinz Frieser. Blitzed adds some new and valuable archival detail but Ohler’s most original contribution is stylistic: he puts Pervitin at the centre of the narrative and the way he talks about it draws on the sensibilities of today’s ...”

“... Hall). Although there have been some nuanced treatments of Basaglia’s work (for example, in Peter Sedgwick’s Psycho Politics), the perception of him in British psychiatry was predominantly formed by hostile assessments that emerged in the 1980s as part of the backlash against ‘antipsychiatry’, particularly Martin Roth and Jerome Kroll’s The ...”

“... welcome, but liable to sink if they take on all exceptions to their rule. Inspired by their reading of social anthropology, Alan Macfarlane and Keith Thomas explained the increase in accusations of witchcraft in early modern England as a result of late 16th-century social and economic change. Steadily, though, incongruent cases gathered in drifts, even ...”

“... pretends to a mysterious ‘chain’ in Les Lettres Persanes, not immediately visible to the naked reading eye, they create their own continuity out of a tone, a set of shared assumptions, a manner of proceeding. For the Tatler’s sun, like that of Heraclitus, had to be relit each morning, or rather every other morning. We read on, sensing the passage of ...”

“... Rubinstein needs strong evidence to deny that Britain’s was ‘the first industrial economy’ (Peter Mathias) or that there was a ‘transformation of the British economy to an industry state’ (Phyllis Deane). The evidence he relies on comes from income-tax returns: ‘The totals for London and the Home Counties may be taken as convenient shorthand or ...”

“... strengthened by the intrusive editing of his book: not only do hosts of square brackets check the reading eye but the narrative is continually interrupted by pieces that give the historical context and often a summary of what is to come, thus both confusing the reader’s chronology and giving him a wearisome sense of repetition. The book that follows is a ...”

“... indirect commodity taxes on domestically-produced goods. Like some economic historians such as Peter Mathias and Patrick O’Brien, Brewer suggests that the taxes may well have been heavier in Britain than in many other European states, and may also have fallen disproportionately hard on the middling and lower classes, rather than the landed and rich. Plus ...”

“... figure of W.K. Wimsatt (still remembered in Oxford for his way of stalking through the Upper Reading Room in the Bodleian Library and stooping over the reserve counter in order to pick up ten books in either acromegalic hand). From this formalism he was rescued by the Cambridge lectures of Marxist Raymond Williams, who taught him not to read literature ...”

“... talking, about speech I mean, he’s actually not so very good at dialogue (not when you think of Peter McDougall or Roddy Doyle). It’s the way people talk to themselves that he gets so brilliantly, so matchlessly. While the peripheral characters in his stories often exchange words in a pretty featureless manner, his central characters have always had a ...”

“... the deadening effect of Soviet-style historical materialism by a more imaginative and selective reading of the texts: this was the milieu in which Finley received his early training, when employed at Columbia from 1937 to 1939 by the Institut in exile. This eclecticism of his has since led him into fierce controversies with orthodox Marxists in Italy and ...”

“... that he was one of them. Yet, surely, he was from boyhood a wandering, adventurous, hard-reading intellectual, eager for fame and the company of the powerful, a roving reporter and a risk-loving political agitator. Rural Rides, his most popular book, has solidified his reputation as a rustic. But 60-year-old peasants don’t go rushing around the ...”

“... and asked that his prize possession, his furred robes, be placed at the altar of the Church of St Peter in Louvain. To posterity, the awesome contemporary reputation of Lipsius’s writing may seem curiously inflated. The admiration aroused by his textual work was often uncritical. His philosophical treatises strung together Classical texts much as Protestant ...”

“... of great letter-writers. The most interesting are not the ones written to his brother from the Peter and Paul Fortress describing his mock-execution and pardon, about which he made little at the time, or the account he later gave his brother of his time in penal servitude. These things were all to be written up later by the novelist. Unlike ...”

“... mental or physical exercise of almost any kind. Two inspirational teachers gave him a love of reading and, more excessively, of animal life. Philip Hobsbaum, who in his later academic career encouraged many writers, including Seamus Heaney and Alasdair Gray, got him to read Nineteen Eighty-Four, which Livingstone reckons influenced his political beliefs ...”

“... as the CIA’s private venture capital firm. One of Palantir’s founders, the billionaire Peter Thiel, described Christopher Columbus as ‘the first multiculturalist’, accused Aimé Césaire of not understanding the transcendental value of The Tempest and advocates for cyberspace, outer space and sea-steading as routes of escape from ‘the ...”