“... among the best known of India’s ancient monuments, after the Taj Mahal. Paralleling Sañchi, the major stupa of south India was at Amaravati (‘place of the immortal’), a river site in Andhara Pradesh. A few carvings are preserved in a small museum at Amaravati itself; a major collection is in the Madras Museum and ...”

“... could scarcely have been higher, there would have been fewer beggars in the streets of all our major towns, the government would have exercised some responsible control of our financial system, thousands of our fellow citizens would not now hold mortgage debts on houses that greatly exceed the value of the houses themselves, manufacturing industry would ...”

“... is like a heavy artillery piece in a muddy Flanders field: point it in one direction and it is a major undertaking to point it in another. But was there more to what was ‘going on’ in Blackpool? In the preceding few days the commentators had begun to discover the ‘dual labour market’ or the ‘Germanisation’ of the English working classes. The core ...”

“... than in London, where the American artist Copley exhibited his Death of Chatham and his Death of Major Peirson in the 1780s. Thereafter, an impresario was generally involved, such as William Bullock, who exhibited Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa as well as dwarfs, Eskimos and so on in the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly (which was later to serve as one of ...”

“... book represents the ending of a grand tradition in the subject, for what he does is to combine Sir John Clapham’s concern with what was happening in the leading sectors of economic activity with the fairly recent techniques and insights of national accounting and demographic inquiry. Crouzet approaches the Victorian economy of Britain initially in ...”

“... much in its precise destination as in the vistas opened out along the route. Unquestionably, the major contribution to our understanding is to be found in Wind’s essay on the heroic portrait. The substance of this lies in its anatomy of 18th-century portraiture under various heads: portraits of children, of young girls, of men of learning, of military and ...”

“... In the spring of 1974, as reports multiplied of his involvement with crooks such as John Poulson and T. Dan Smith, Reginald Maudling disappeared to Paris with his wife, Beryl. The Daily Mail’s Harry Longmuir had little difficulty locating him in the ‘Président’ suite of the George V. Checking in himself, Longmuir spent a whole Sunday morning with a confused, disorientated Maudling in his dressing-gown ...”

“... his Long March through it in the opposite direction, escaping from the south-east, he counted it a major achievement simply to have survived. Khubilai, already in his mid-thirties, was commander of this bold expedition as far as present-day Yunnan province on the Burmese border; a subordinate completed the encirclement by turning eastward and invading ...”

“... philosophy. As a youth, Melbourne spent two winters in Glasgow, living plainly and studying with John Millar, disciple of David Hume and Adam Smith, and one of the most influential proselytisers for the Scottish Enlightenment. This experience gave him a strong commitment to the principles of political economy; it also profoundly influenced his thinking on ...”

“... In the movie, however, it provides the occasion for one of Hollywood’s happy endings, in which John Quincy Adams moves the Supreme Court to a recognition of human rights by eloquently invoking the Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately, this never happened. The justices did, indeed, send the Africans home, but their decision turned on maritime law and ...”

“... veterans at its core, including the legendary fighter pilot and theoretician of conflict Colonel John Boyd, argued that the complex and expensive weapons systems championed by the Pentagon and its industrial partners were inevitably unreliable and often ineffective in combat. Instead, they advocated cheaper, simpler and thoroughly tested systems such as the ...”

“... Essex’s Irish campaign in 1599; he took with him a verse-letter from his university friend John Donne, though for Rutter ‘it’s anyone’s guess how, as a soldier headed into a guerrilla war, he read the fantastically tortured images Donne wrapped around ideas of astonishing crassness.’ By the spring of 1601, however, Wotton had abandoned his ...”

“... among the English middle classes, the early 20th century was a more genteel time than the 1750s. John Somerville, a youngish English archaeologist, digging in Mesopotamia in the spring of 1914, thinks he may have discovered evidence that would definitively resolve a number of uncertainties in the history of the late Assyrian Empire. Since those uncertainties ...”

“... bouts of illness, contributing to the dispatch and defeat of a British force at Coruña under Sir John Moore. Canning genuinely believed that the war would be lost unless Castlereagh was removed. He was generally supported in this view but was balked by the indecisiveness of the prime minister, the 71-year-old Duke of Portland, a favourite of George III. This ...”

“... for small reward he was teaching me geography in Edinburgh) and Robin Robertson, or the Irishman John F. Deane, or now the American Patty Crane. They were drawn by the small vocabulary, the short sentences, the largely transferable word-order, the language that seems to pay twenty shillings to the pound – darkness, stone, light, tree, cold. You feel the ...”