“... agenda. Medievalist Wissenschaft (the term has scientific connotations largely absent from the English word ‘scholarship’) was grounded in philology. Ethnic identity was defined by linguistic identity: a German was the speaker of a Germanic language and German identity thus extended to Spain, North Africa, the Netherlands and Italy – areas that had ...”

“... copy of Chase’s book, the officers of the Essex ‘knew not that for more than twenty years the English … had been resident in Tahiti; & that in the same year of the shipwreck – 1820 – it was entirely safe.’ The two mates argued for a different plan: the three boats would sail south for 1500 miles, until they were out of the trades and into a belt ...”

“... lower-class Indian – Merchant himself was convinced that this was ‘a matter of record’: Sir Richard Burton ‘had done exactly that again and again’. Merchant was educated at St Xavier’s College in Bombay before leaving for the US in 1958, and was clearly not so sceptical about colonialist claims of conducting a mission civilisatrice in the way that ...”

“... in the decade. By 1950 change was coming. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published in English in 1953. There were increasing opportunities for women who were bold and determined enough to take them. Yet for all Cooke’s justified satisfaction in finding so many possible subjects from which to make her selection, the cumulative effect is to ...”

“... autonomy, inner responsibility, moral obligation and so forth’, ‘deniers’ like Richard Rorty who were inclined to reduce talk of the true and the right to what we find it convenient to believe – were discomfited by his dazzle. But in fact he was a constructive man. Shooting an idea out of someone’s hand as soon as it came up, he would ...”

“... miles away, immersed in philology and comparative jurisprudence. His friends or admirers, from Richard Price to Mary Wollstonecraft, might be making trouble, but at least he wouldn’t be replying to Burke’s Reflections. There wasn’t much danger of Jones fomenting unrest in India. Franklin makes persuasive analogies between the subaltern peoples whose ...”

“... In most Shakespeare biographies Ann has no life; while her husband is off changing the course of English literature (when not dallying with dark ladies and young men) she sits at home, unoccupied for thirty years or so, awaiting his return. Many even doubt whether she could read or write, while few have given much thought to how she might have been ...”

“... for electoral reasons. The desirability of owning one’s house has a long history in all English-speaking countries and there are good social arguments for private ownership. But there is a thin line between social desirability and political calculation, and Thatcher crossed it with complete insouciance. The mandatory sale of council housing was ...”

“... Lhasa has formed in the town around the nucleus of the Dalai Lama: schools teach in Tibetan and English, there are various government ministries, a national library, a troupe which preserves and performs Tibetan dances and songs. Versions of the main Tibetan monasteries have been built where the monks go about their business dressed in an unlikely ...”

“... pay and to return $250,000 to the Trust. It was a spectacularly extravagant decision to commission Richard Meier in 1984 to build a new Getty Center – including the chief museum, the Research Institute and the Conservation Center – as a cluster of buildings on a hilltop in Brentwood accessible only (for ordinary visitors and most staff) by a steep ...”

“... 19th century. Gradgrindism, as they might have said, was no accident. When, a few years later, an English translation of Engels’s Dialectics of Nature appeared with an introduction by the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, a close associate at Cambridge, the group felt that at last they had the theoretical tools they needed. Life could not be reduced to mere ...”

“... to the unfolding national crisis. Ponderings II-VI, the first volume to be translated into English, covers the period from 1931 to 1938 (the notebook from 1930 has not been found). It is in 1931 that Heidegger first begins to notice a change, and ‘the political stirring of the young people’. He feels their ‘desire to come again onto a ...”

“... minutes of the Assembly, his 36-man delegation included ‘Arabs, Chaldaeans, Prussians, Poles, English, Swiss, Germans, Dutchmen, Swedes, Italians, Spaniards, Americans, Indians, Syrians, Brabaçons, Liégeois, Avignonnais, Genevans’. Moved by their entreaties, the deputies not only reserved a special place for foreigners at the celebrations on 14 ...”

“... worked for Darwin among others, Hawkins worked on the Crystal Palace dinosaurs with the scientist Richard Owen, who had coined the word ‘dinosaur’ (from the Greek deinos, ‘terrible’, and sauros, ‘lizard’) in 1841. Theirs was the first attempt to revivify dry fossil bones and even drier scientific discourse for a large public. Though the sculptures ...”

“... half days – he managed to come third, two places behind Ruqayyah Rida, one of the most talented English girls ever to have played the game. In reality, oceans of ability lay between Charlie and Rida; he was just thrilled to find himself on an adjacent board to her. But he was also developing new levels of patience: one of his games in Nottingham drifted ...”