“... solid but an impulse, an atmosphere. Everybody knows what Roentgen did in science, even though we may know or need to know nothing else about him: he discovered X-rays in 1895. Few know who Higgs was or is, but he gave his name to the mysterious Higgs Boson, about which physicists argue. Nothing in science permanently carries Bernal’s name. Most of those ...”

“... masters. These efforts culminated in the Somerset decision of 1772, a legal circumlocution which may not actually have ended slavery but which persuaded a good many people – planters included – that it had done. During the Revolution itself, the loyal British governor of Virginia, the Earl of Dunmore, offered the slaves of Patriot farmers freedom in ...”

“... to a million instantaneous deaths,’ he wrote in the New York Review of Books. ‘The President may protest that his SDI dream implies a protection of people and not of silos. But however many times he does so, the fact is that were the “unthinkable” ever to occur, a future American President would probably never know how his enemy had behaved. He could ...”

“... to intercept Hammarskjöld’s DC-6 was provided only by Beukels – some of the general points may have been touched on by de Troye in earlier meetings with Kemoularia. But the notes give the impression that Mr X and Lamoumine had their own sources inside the UN and knew when Hammarskjöld left Leopoldville for Ndola. Beukels was instructed by the high ...”

“... in the intervening years. Macmillan’s feeling at the time was that ‘in essence, the plan may be right but it cannot be rushed.’ This sentiment might stand as the epitome of the feelings of most ministers on most subjects throughout the decade. If they subscribed to any one doctrine, it was not Butskellism or even conservatism, it was the Doctrine ...”

“... is from Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ – Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt (‘where your gentle wing may come to rest’). I think of the word in connection with my birthday. On the evening of 6 September, from as early as I can remember until I was ten or so, my father and I would lie on a couch and listen to a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth. For the first ...”

“... did not prevent increased spending on education, health or measures to reduce child poverty. It may seem a tall order to ask for a levy which fulfils these conditions, but Rudolf Meidner, the former chief economist of the LO, the main Swedish trade union federation, and an architect of the country’s welfare state, devised such a measure in the ...”

“... to scare the Soviets into thinking that Nixon was ‘mad’ enough to start an atomic war. Reagan may have doubted his anti-Communist credentials, but Kissinger quickly accommodated himself to the New Right. ‘We all now turn to Ronald Reagan as the trustee of our hopes,’ he told the crowd at the 1980 nominating convention, which held him in only slightly ...”

“... could expand opportunities for all. Far from being fatalists and diehard enemies of progress, they may even have been overconfident about the power of democratically elected political authority to regulate the market for moral reasons, to reduce poverty, to increase educational opportunity, to avoid war. The real road to serfdom, according to Cold War liberals ...”

“... and the war in Gaza, but they do cover the brief war that broke out between Israel and Hamas in May 2021. Biden expressed support for Netanyahu during nine days of Israeli airstrikes and Hamas rocket attacks, and then told him over the phone: ‘Hey man, we’re out of runway here. It’s over.’ Netanyahu agreed to a ceasefire brokered by Egypt. It was ...”

“... bring peace to the realm. Those who supported Hugh no doubt hoped for political advantage; they may also have decided that he would be the more effective ruler. The legitimacy of his rule was challenged, not least in its first years, when a rebellion by the rejected Charles of Lorraine nearly succeeded in toppling him. But this needs to be set against the ...”

“... but never to the same point in time or space. As Le Guin said in an interview: ‘Homecoming may not be such an easy visit, after all. The world is changing. It is a spiral. That is kind of the point.’The primary moral law of Le Guin’s fiction, that fully realised power creates its own destructive counter-currents, operates to her disadvantage in ...”

“... are directed towards someone who is never going to return them? That’s the point at which they may curdle into violence, and it was this mutation that Herrmann was able to capture so well, and express so brilliantly, in his scores for Vertigo, Psycho and Marnie. Perhaps, in the end, that was why Hitchcock broke with him: perhaps he couldn’t forgive ...”

“... faction who disagreed. The tap of CCP support was turned off and the riots, which began in May 1967, abated by the end of the year.The riots gave people a sense that Hong Kong, a place that could seem pragmatic and business-minded to a fault, was on the edge of an abyss. The potential for violent ungovernable disorder was right below the surface of the ...”

“... master and my author’ just to make a point about the necessity of baptism? The answer may seem obvious until we note that several righteous pagans are in fact saved. Two of them, Ripheus and the emperor Trajan, inhabit the sphere of Justice in the Paradiso. A popular legend held that Gregory the Great, bewailing Trajan’s damnation, secured a ...”