“... monarchical society into a democratic one unlike any that had ever existed’, though even this may underestimate its constitutional legacy. The United States resolved ancient political conundrums that still bedevil European and British politics, problems such as federal government, divided sovereignty, democratic rule over an extended territory and the ...”

“... attempt to conquer the world, using ‘crowd-psychology’. Thirdly, it is uncompleted, though it may not seem incomplete. Broch worked on it for almost twenty years, while completing other work. More than one version of The Spell has been published. One of them is called The Tempter. The tale is told by a country doctor in the Austrian Alps: his practice ...”

“... precise cause was the Marquess’s suspicion that his son had been Rosebery’s lover. The suicide may have been occasioned by fear of blackmail, or possibly by a desire to save Rosebery from a politically ruinous scandal. His tenure as prime minister was brief and insecure, and though it did occur to him to come to Wilde’s assistance at the time of the ...”

“... attempts to celebrate his subject we see the man’s reputation sink wanly over the horizon. He may have initiated some fruitful lines of enquiry, later developed by others, but he himself seems to have been unable to pursue these lines with any surefootedness or perspicacity. You begin to understand why he wrote so little. Funny things, reputations. Steer ...”

“... have remembered her own dictum that ‘the historian is concerned with the sober reality.’ It may not be true, and there is much to be said for the imaginative speculation, but facts on their own would be better than stereotypes. And there are plenty of sober facts to be collected in this area which can stir the dullest spirit. I have to confess that ...”

“... that Freud’s rooting of adult proclivities of various kinds in the vicissitudes of infancy may also be just ‘good similes’. What in Freud’s etiological speculations might have moved Wittgenstein to this view? He may have felt it was justified because when Freud invoked certain infantile activities as ...”

“... official line in Havana is that when the incumbent’s current five-year term is up, in 1998, he may pass his official duties on to younger successors. He would then have ruled Cuba for forty years, retiring at the age of 71. (Joaquín Balaguer, in the adjoining Dominican Republic, though blind, was last year re-elected President for the sixth time, at the ...”

“... so again in the 19th century, but the practice was unusual in the 17th and 18th centuries. This may seem surprising, because it is striking how well paintings of this period look in frames made at the same date. Meticulous depictions of flowers or sober Dutch wives in crisp white ruffs arc happiest bound by hard sharp dark mouldings with a taut skin of ...”

“... spending, or rather, not taxing and not spending). Wright’s message is a very simple one. This may be the fifth consecutive general election for ‘the New Conservatism of a Thatcherised party’, but ‘it is the first election in which New Labour is the alternative.’ This remaking of the party system is clearly the result of two strong personal ...”

“... Mary Queen of Scots and the Jacobite risings. The more sophisticated English absorbers of history may also entertain an uneasy recollection that the Scots had something to do with the English Civil Wars, and may even have an impression of outbreaks of Presbyterian intransigence in the 19th century: but for most people in ...”

“... on paper – a foretaste of an exhibition devoted to Freud prints and drawings which will open in May at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and will then travel to four other British venues and on to three museums in the United States of America.* Much of this article arises from conversations which I have had with the artist whilst writing on the early drawings ...”

“... national essence from the one which has penetrated so deep into their modern psyche that it may never be successfully extracted. Maybe the uncomfortable truth will always be resisted. But a nationalism did emerge, thanks mainly to the Reformation. Until then, the Isles remained intimately bonded with the mainland. Davies elaborates for this earlier ...”

“... the mole-hunting variety, have been distorting it into a morality tale of the Cold War. Scholars may talk as they please, constructing complex patterns of interpretation for a minority audience: the popular ground has been won by the Chapman Pincher school of history, with its attendant band of novelists, journalists and politicians. The message they bear is ...”

“... like Harvey and perhaps his author, that a very old story encapsulates a permanent truth, you may assume great freedom in reworking it in order to accommodate that truth to people who fail to perceive its immediate relevance. Making up stories in order to update or explain older stories, to make sense of them under altered conditions, is a highly ...”

“... Scargill to be at the head of the vanguard, at the very tip of the spearhead of revolution. It may not be exactly that, but it is surely something very like it. How else explain, for example, the one great loophole in Scargill’s defences, which has justified more than a quarter of the miners in their decision to go on working, and which ...”