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“... pacifist is cast incongruously in the role of the magician whose incantations unleash demonic powers. This formula does, in fact, come out of relativity theory – but it is only one example of the immense technological consequences of Einstein’s theoretical research. The hypothesis that light itself is quantised, which he put forward in that same ...”

“... order that underpinned the entire international system. Taking the hostility of these two weighty powers into account, the Italian Prime Minister rightly worried that ‘the settlement to be arrived at’ would ‘lack the assent of more than half of the population of the European continent’. Two key points emerge: first, the Allies as well as the Central ...”

“... history of the past two centuries. But they have been, by and large, the achievement of colonial powers, and their political development remained in the retentive hands of European functionaries. Israel is different, and so were the Crusading kingdoms of the Levant which preceded it. Here, moreover, Europeans were not colonials but migrants, creating their ...”

“... was the longest-running and most intractable diplomatic problem in the world. All the European powers had good reasons to keep the Ottoman regime intact across most of its sprawling, often only half-governed territories, even though some of them also had particular reasons for wanting to take over specific bits of that territory, mainly in the Balkans or ...”

“... the Manchu Qing regime recovered faster from the effects of this crisis than any of the European powers is a provocative one, that will only be definitively assessed when the true impact of the erratic shifts in bullion flow on China has received further attention. But it is a worthy attempt to draw China into world history, and it is supplemented by ...”

“... Jonathan Lethem’s novels tend to be fusions of genres. As She Climbed across the Table (1997) is a science-fiction campus novel; Girl in Landscape (1998) an SF western. Gun, with Occasional Music (1994), his first novel, is a detective story set in a dystopian future. Narcotics are doled out by the state, and knowledge of the past has been eradicated ...”

“... things that I have seen I now can see no more’) confirmed and supported Wordsworth’s powers. The Immortality Ode has all the gusto of a celebration of his uniquely creative form of solipsism, whose powers of sympathy are as great as its powers of attracting love, or of ...”

“... pandemic has exposed some uncomfortable truths about the modern British state: its vast emergency powers, but also its unpreparedness for the unexpected, its scope for inefficiency under lax leadership, and its instinctive reliance on corporate contracts. In November 2020, the National Audit Office reported that the government had awarded £18 billion in ...”

“... make something of his life, an intense seriousness about working out his opinions, and tremendous powers of organisation. Having the run of the 18,000 books at the Adams Old House in Quincy shaped him much more than the dusty traditionalism of Harvard. After graduating, he decided to study in Berlin, thinking it the home of honest philosophical and historical ...”

“... Old Glory – the book written by Jonathan Raban – is an altogether different book from the Old Glory that was praised in the reviews, but it is no less wonderful for that. The book the reviewers wrote about does not exist at all, except as the ghost of an intention. This phantasmal Old Glory is the book which Raban originally planned to write, and which he expected would be little more than an elegant travel diary: the record of a passive drifting journey down the Mississippi in the track of Huckleberry Finn ...”

“... It now occupies an almost entirely neutral constitutional space, which has helped to limit the powers and pretensions of politicians. It is a more effective symbol of national unity at times of crisis for being both apolitical and personal. By drawing to his or her fallible self a lot of the popular enthusiasm that might otherwise be bestowed on ...”

“... on China in 1859-60, after the Chinese emperor resisted a trade treaty insisted on by the two powers, who had just bombarded Canton. More than 200 ships arrived with 23,000 men and modern artillery, attacked the forts on the river Pei-ho, and opened a path to Peking. After the Chinese captured and tortured a Times correspondent, the allied forces razed ...”

“... and he was soon launched on a posthumous career as the figurehead of the atheistic movements that Jonathan Israel likes to call the ‘radical enlightenment’. Subversive Spinozism was still being championed in plebeian London as late as the 1830s, when – as G.H. Lewes would recall – a poverty-stricken German Jewish watchmaker called Cohn (‘a man of ...”

“... site of geostrategic rivalry: it is after all the only place in the world where three imperial powers are fighting for control of the same territory. Russia, the most recent external ruler, exploited the area for two centuries; for commercial as well as nostalgic reasons it is reluctant to lose its remaining influence. China sees the region as a temptingly ...”

“... abolition to their own and allied governments – Mrs Thatcher was particularly scathing. But as Jonathan Schell points out in The Gift of Time, ‘history often creates a problem whose only real solution lies beyond the pale of current political acceptability.’ Reykjavik expanded the pale: it brought the idea of abolishing nuclear weapons into the realm ...”