“... Morgan’s controlling stake and his public withdrawal of support. Tesla’s AC patents expired in May 1905, dramatically reducing his income; that autumn he suffered a breakdown, physical and mental, and work at Wardenclyffe stopped. The great tower was torn down in 1917 – possibly by his creditors, possibly by the US Marines, who feared that U-boats might ...”

“... must be friends with spiders and snakes, and a whole lot of other nonsensical stuff which we may as well concede is funny in its way and funny to a point. But it is no longer Huckleberry Finn; it is no longer an unflinching tale of the cruelty and wrong of human bondage. ‘In the whole reach of English literature,’ Bernard DeVoto wrote in ...”

“... wine. This instruction survived through 1559, and then, significantly, disappeared in 1662. That may be a remarkably brutal transformation, but Cranmer could be very nuanced in the language he used to realign the nature of this drama, which so divided Christians. He was unhappily conscious in 1549 that his traditionalist colleagues in the House of Lords ...”

“... to measure – and that’s a practical matter – but measures are not merely more or less, they may be just or unjust. There is no way to disentangle their instrumental and moral aspects. Standards were norms, just as the Roman norma was a tool for obtaining right angles, the usage later extending to standards of right moral action. God traditionally kept ...”

“... On 19 May 1836, less than a month after the Texan Republic won independence from Mexico in the Battle of San Jacinto, a large group of Indians rode up to the gate of Parker’s Fort, near present-day Mexia, east of Waco. The Parker clan had travelled from Illinois to the extremities of the Texas frontier three years earlier, with 30 oxcarts of belongings and a religious zeal that was anything but missionary ...”

“... 12-minute short was screened in Mexico City to help raise funds for the victims. In early May they went to the state of Hidalgo, and spent the next four months at a hacienda at Tetlapayac, in the middle of a landscape strewn with maguey plants; the smell of fermenting pulque wafted through the air, volcanoes shimmered in the distance. Tensions had by ...”

“... conviction), was fit to manage his relations with the press. The appointment of Coulson, made in May 2007 on the recommendation of the shadow chancellor, George Osborne, soon proved its political worth. News International’s tabloids switched their support from Labour to the Conservatives; and senior Conservatives and Scotland Yard officials managed to ...”

“... To add to the comfort, the enemy has an endless capacity to blunder, and while the heroes may be unconventional – Macintyre loves all that – they are also cunning and brave and generally impervious, like comic-book characters. He delights in the codenames devised by Robertson: a fat agent is called ‘Balloon’; a womaniser with a fondness for ...”

“... the buildings looking out onto the boardwalk and the ocean. I went to see him there. The building may once have been prestigious but now Volodya’s apartment was at the end of a long, black, mouldy corridor smelling of stewed cabbage. His walls were yellow with cigarette smoke, the main room empty apart from a huge plasma TV. He lives alone. A wardrobe ran ...”

“... narrative to the capture of a single moment, and from a verbal to a visual medium. For Miller this may appear to be an ‘effacement of the problem of language’, because ‘the implication is that the language of realism is a literal, non-figurative language functioning like a photograph or like a scientific drawing. It goes by way of a one-to-one ...”

“... position occupied by no other city in a European society of comparable size. Madrid, Rome, Berlin may be capitals, but to their rank as seats of government corresponds no such predominance in culture, where Barcelona, Milan, Frankfurt can in different ways rival or outdo them. London is flanked by seats of learning whose prestige has long surpassed its ...”

“... this, some more information about your school education, for example, or your family background, may be useful.’ Coetzee, who was 33 and a lecturer in the University of Cape Town’s English department, replied: The information you suggest suggests that I settle for a particular identity I should feel most uneasy in. A few words about my schooling, for ...”

“... that detained children are physically abused in these prisons. A boy who steals a pomegranate may steal another one and end up next to a kid who knows the quick way to another world. One boy, Beltoon, came from the province of Paktia. The families in his village competed over whose sons would be sent to the madrassah. ‘You do not love your son, you do ...”

“... treat their elderly, remain healthy, talk, spend their leisure time and settle disputes – may strike you, as they do me, as superior to normal practices in the First World. The lens through which Diamond, an unrelenting environmental biologist, sees the world affords striking insights but there are still massive blind spots. His discussion of ...”

“... It is not merely the size of India; it is not merely the population of India – and I may say that one out of every four of the people represented at this conference is an Indian – it is that on purely objective economic criteria, India feels that she is an extremely important part of the world and will probably be an even more important part in ...”