“... early response. It was used by government experts in media appearances: notoriously by David Halpern, head of the Behavioural Insights Team (aka the ‘Nudge Unit’), in a BBC News interview, but also by Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser. As late as 13 March, he told Radio 4 that one of the ‘key things we need to do ...”

“... idea of the Renaissance hopelessly flimsy, nothing but a collection of fantasies about what it means to be modern and human?Pico was born in 1463 in Mirandola, near Modena, to a noble family. According to family legend, a circle of flame appeared above his mother’s bed. Pico was a child prodigy in Latin and Greek, with a miraculous memory. As a young ...”

“... following much precedent, as negative liberty. As we have seen, by negative liberty Berlin means absence of constraint, and the specific interpretation he believes must be given to the concept of constraint is that it must consist in some act of interference, by some external agency, with the capacity of another agent to pursue ‘possible choices and ...”

“... an adaptation of Blaise Cendrars’s L’Or, and a version of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. David O. Selznick praised Eisenstein’s Dreiser adaptation, but said that its critique of American society ‘cannot possibly offer anything but a most miserable two hours to millions of happy-minded young Americans’. ‘Let’s try new things by all ...”

“... make a note for future use in such a form … that even you yourself will not know what it means, when you come across it some months later.’My notes are voluminous because my interests have never been very narrowly focused. My subject is what I think of as the historical ethnography of early modern England. Equipped with questions posed by ...”

“... It’s got to tear [the audience] apart, scream at them, that’s what my character is.’In David Looseley’s new interpretation, Piaf’s notoriously elusive life story is best told as cultural history. This is a book about Piaf and her crowd. Rather than trying to get to the ‘real’ Piaf, as Robert Belleret did in Piaf, un mythe français ...”

“... farcical, as the loss and recovery of his bones intertwines with the tempestuous fate of Italy. David Bowe reads Dante in dialogue with other lyricists of the duecento, while George Corbett examines his ethics and politics, appraising his magisterial synthesis of Aristotelian and Christian thought. John Took asks ‘why Dante matters’ and responds by ...”

“... lists were drawn up of such notorious Communists or Communist sympathisers as Brian Walden, David Owen, Robert Mellish, John Stonehouse, Roy Hattersley and Reg Prentice; and even a bogus pamphlet on ‘revolutionary strategy’ for the installation of socialism in Britain was contrived for off-the-record briefing of American journalists, the joint ...”

“... changed over time. The key was Parliament, which served both to concentrate power and as a unique means of legitimating that power in the nation at large. Despite the obvious inequities of the representative system, the fact that it existed at all, and that Parliament existed, convinced many Britons that their state was a peculiarly free one and that its ...”

“... has a long nave with plentiful seating and many smaller circumjacent chapels. In the next decade, David Riesman and Gerald Grant continued in the same vein but added: ‘Occasionally a visionary from one of the side altars will seize the main pulpit ... to lecture the vulgar utilitarians and then march off to found a rival church.’ Among the Luthers they ...”

“... argued document asking for the review to be undertaken in the first place. The NCC’s chairman, David Pascall, is a former member of Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street Policy Unit. The former head of the Policy Unit, Lord Griffiths, now chairs the School Examinations and Assessment Council (SEAC) which will soon be merged with NCC. It just so happens that ...”

“... Boswell on the occasion of needling his famous friend with the news that the atheist philosopher David Hume had died well and without repentance. ‘The horror of death, which I had always observed in Dr Johnson, appeared strong tonight.’ Sherwin Nuland a surgeon from Yale, speaks to the Johnson in each of us, to our hunger for knowledge of our inevitable ...”

“... evidence to refute Goudsmit’s accusation, confirming the conclusion already reached in David Irving’s The German Atomic Bomb, that the German physicists wanted to build a reactor, but not a bomb. Their secretly recorded comments on Hiroshima have now provided further evidence of their reluctance; Heisenberg apparently regarded it as ...”

“... using phrases like ‘collective Arab narrative’ in their conversations with Said at the UN, and David Gilmour, one of the authors under review, is equally improbably described as being frustrated by the ‘non-narrative character of Lebanon’s problems’. Reports of events since the fall of Beirut are described as ‘pre-narrative or, in a ...”

“... that sort of picture, as do Dostoevsky’s own letters, a selection of which has been edited by David Goldstein and Frank. The editing is superb, the notes meticulous, but it must be said that Dostoevsky does not come into the category of great letter-writers. The most interesting are not the ones written to his brother from the Peter and Paul Fortress ...”