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“... A for Britain. ‘The truth is that Churchill succumbed to a temptation to frogmarch events,’ Douglas Newton declares in The Darkest Days. Newton’s close-focus examination of events in Britain over the week leading up to war has an overt polemical intent: ‘This book is meant to unsettle. It attacks the ...”

“... nor amused enough for Billy Wilder, but it still rankles that he never had a chance to work with Douglas Sirk, though in Lawrence’s view of things, directors are not the issue, except when they turn into bullies. Her anti-directorial stance is at its strongest when it comes to the admittedly ghastly Huston; if his Freud (1962) is as good as she believes it ...”

“... as the publicity department’s dream come true, an exotic counterpart to the solid partnership of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Then, on 23 August 1926, Valentino died from peritonitis following an appendectomy. If the public demanded heightened life and artifice on the screen, at a burial they required strict naturalism. At his funeral, Negri ...”

“... October in New York – is being seen as the decisive factor. Contrary to the publishers’ blurb, Newton Minow and Craig LaMay’s book is not the first account of the history of the debates (Alan Schroeder’s Presidential Debates: Forty Years of High-Risk TV, first published in 2001, has just been updated and reissued). But Minow, as former head of the ...”

“... tenderness. Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy in 1723, the son of a formidable mother, Margaret Douglas, and a dead customs officer, also named Adam Smith. At the age of 14, he went up to Glasgow University which seems, from Ross’s description, to have been in a tumult of religious zeal, a sort of Calvinist University of Cairo; but there he came under the ...”

“... imaginative invention. On the other hand, many of the greatest mathematicians such as Archimedes, Newton and Gauss have combined with these artistic gifts a very different type of genius: one enabling them to use mathematics to solve practical problems in the physical world, and to carry further the massive growth in knowledge of the physical sciences. These ...”

“... War. Technology, War and Fascism assembles a few Marcusan parerga from these years of service. Douglas Kellner has edited some Nachlass jottings from the Forties, and promises that, at annual intervals, further collections from the archives will be published, which will show the ‘persisting importance of Marcuse’s thought as we prepare’, so it ...”

“... buffer who once dealt expertly with press relations for the Tory government under Sir Alec Douglas Home, tells his readers on deadline day that for every yellow-bellied Guardian reader ‘a score will find their pulses quicken, when, as Kipling put it in his poem, “the drums begin to roll.” ’ The drums of death and mass destruction do something ...”

“... and experimental validity is now accepted with almost the same confidence among physicists as Newton’s Laws of motion and Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism amongst mechanical and electrical engineers. It must be emphasised that this apparent movement of physics from hard-nosed realism to a much more open and imaginative stance has occurred in ...”

“... Trinity gave to science by using her great wealth to found the Science Park and the Isaac Newton Institute, and make Cambridge a scientific city as well as a university. Brooke replies that he is writing the history of the university not the colleges. Winstanley wrote his history of later Victorian Cambridge by minutely analysing institutional ...”

“... set herself to master their systems of representation as if learning a new language. In Charles Newton, Keeper of Classical Antiquities at the British Museum, she found an experienced archaeologist to work with, and she familiarised herself with the results of recent excavations (including those of Schliemann at Troy and Evans in Crete). She began to give ...”

“... for the cultural universals urged by anthropologists as different as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglas. Cultures – a word that has long been overused, and which I try to avoid – are entities that exist because children are nurtured into systems of practices and reactions that define the collective lives of individuals. Nurture, as Galton meant ...”

“... all the greatest and noblest efforts of intellect. To this constancy we owe the immortal mind of a Newton. So if you really want to bring about whatever progress is attainable, then you can’t rail against human need and misery and attempt to fix them through charity or paying labour more than the market rate. It’s been said that the optimist believes we ...”

“... 20th-century non-linear-dynamical point of view. It’s a funny book, Time Bandits crossed with Douglas Adams. It’s an enormous, systematic study of order and disorder, which moves to the strange, slow rhythms of what historians call the longue durée. Although the bulk of its action seems to happen in North America, it is also about 18th-century ...”

“... artistic figures he reveres are mostly the fallen – Swift, Blake, Clare, Isaac Rosenberg, Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, Robert Desnos, Charles Péguy, Paul Celan, as well as people who are defined by their outsiderness, such as the young Berkeley and the mathematician Alan Turing – whose integrity is interwoven with their ruin. The poem is full of short ...”