“... 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 ...”

“... One of John Cheever’s most famous stories is called ‘The Swimmer’. It is set, like much of his fiction, in the lawned suburbs somewhere outside New York City, and it is filled, like most of his fiction, with despair. The hero, Neddy Merrill, the father of four daughters, is sitting by a neighbour’s pool drinking gin when the idea comes to him that he might reach home by doing a lap of all of his neighbours’ pools on the way ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... immunity. It’s very early days to assess the extent to which it escapes, but it would be a major surprise if it wasn’t substantially less well neutralised by antibodies generated by the vaccines. Researchers (including the team I work with at the Crick Institute) are rushing to quantify this. The first studies may report in a matter of days, and we ...”

“... liberation. Despite this, Garvey was taken up by the religion as a divinely inspired prophet, the John the Baptist of Rastafari. By 1940, he too was in England. Haile Selassie declined an invitation to meet him. Garvey died that year, a fact that many of his unwanted followers refused to believe, and since Haile Selassie’s reported demise in 1975 his own ...”

“... wen, and with the end of the Neapolitan kingdom the Bourbon Court which had been one of its few major sources of direct or indirect employment disappeared. Camorra, a network of clientage underpinned by the threat of violence, gave a certain paradoxical order to this explosive situation. Nothing comparable appears to have existed in Sicily until the ...”