“... was not invariably all that different from the rest of Europe. By the same token, Mrs Thatcher may believe that Magna Carta secured liberty more effectively than did the French Revolution. But there has as yet been no revival of a British history emphasising native constitutional achievements. Indeed, some of the most unabashed Tory historians seem far ...”

“... Sindona were members of P2 and both contributed extensively to Gelli’s financial activities. In May 1981, P2 was exposed in a blaze of publicity which kept every newspaper and television station in Italy busy for months, brought down the Government, and ultimately led to the election of the first non-Christian Democrat prime minister since the war. The ...”

“... sake the choice of assumed name should be arbitrary and inscrutable. In some cases, there may be the good reason that the author has something important to lose if he’s recognised. Patrick Mann’s novels (Steal Big, Dog Day Afternoon) carry the front-cover information that ‘Patrick Mann is the pseudonym of a former US Army Intelligence agent who ...”

“... little lines under or above’ or ‘by some prickes, or whatsoever letter or mark may best help to call the knowledge of the thing to remembrance’. Newton used to turn down the corners of the pages of his books so that they pointed to the exact passage he wished to recall. J.H. Plumb once showed me a set of Swift’s works given him by ...”

“... for his first and last chapters, and the theme of the private realm as something easily forfeited may engage him more profoundly than his thriller plot, for all the casual mastery of his handling. The meeting of Calvin’s Neighbourhood Watch, long delayed, beautifully led up to, is a classic of grotesque comedy. Only one little incident, early on in the ...”

“... writers who have perpetrated the most evil among men.’ If Locke has a competitor in this, it is David Hume, ‘the most culpable of these fatal writers who will not cease to damn the [18th] century in the eyes of posterity, the one who has used the most talent with the most composure to produce the most evil.’ Europe is in chaos because intellectuals like ...”

“... Pillar in 1948. Vidal’s sly mockery of Michiko Kakutani, the paper’s leading book reviewer, may have goaded them into arthritic action. Yet the grumpy reaction to this book is partly – largely? – Vidal’s own fault. He has generated a Gore Glut which even the most skilful wave of Kaplan’s wand could not have whisked away. With the deft, evocative ...”

“... Lewin succeeded in winning War Cabinet authority for a change in the Rules of Engagement on 2 May to allow hunter-killer submarine attacks on any Argentine surface ships outside Argentine territorial waters. That was how the General Belgrano came to be destroyed later the same day despite the fact that London knew it had been heading toward home waters ...”

“... for this sort of role. If they can give the appearance of aliveness and yet not disappoint, they may have an advantage over human beings as a kind of ‘spare part’, and open new possibilities for narcissistic experience with machines. From this point of view, relational artefacts make a certain amount of sense as successors to the always more resistant ...”

“... ever known rolled into one: Barnum & Bailey to James Brown, Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Temple, and David Blaine, and Peter Pan, all the way back to Neverland. We want to see him as pop’s greatest distortion of human nature, which he may be, but isn’t he also the most interesting person on the planet? Jackson’s ...”

“... weeks ago – though, of course, I heard bits and scraps’. The letter is dated 1627, so there may be a joke here rather than an error. Still, I don’t think we need to see Joyce as being disingenuous – David Greetham wonders about this in an essay in a booklet accompanying the new edition of Finnegans Wake – since ...”

“... Apsley (1616-83). The poem described by Lee as ‘rarely accessible’, now easily accessible in David Norbrook’s modern spelling edition, offers according to Norbrook ‘a particularly strong corrective to the conventional view that literature after 1660 became firmly Royalist’, for it is entirely informed by the religious and political ideals of ...”

“... Scottish Greens and to survive the fallout from Alex Salmond’s formation of a new party, Alba, may appear miraculous in retrospect. Now is the time of schism.I grew up in the Free Church of Scotland. I knew it as a community of urban Highlanders with Calvinist theology and socially conservative politics in which everyone knew everyone, not just at the ...”

“... recorded by the French-Mauritian chronicler Nicolas Mayeur in 1806 and reproduced in the late David Graeber’s Pirate Enlightenment, called for gun flints, lead balls, gunpowder and river water to be mixed in an upturned shield with the point of a knife, the draught then taken with ginger soaked in the blood of the oath-takers. Mayeur, a retired slave ...”

“... depth in English political fictions, when these are compared with works of European origin, may be due to the fact that the English simply lack any experience of the totalitarian state: ‘The special world created by secret-police forces, censorship of opinion, torture and frame-up trials is, of course, known about and to some extent disapproved ...”