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“... complete the Collins when he had finished a somewhat similar job for Hamlyn. Both Urdang and T.H. Long were earlier on the Random House Dictionary. All very cosy. But while it desirably makes for shared knowledge and a solid tradition (a euphemism, some would say, for massive reciprocal plagiarism), it is not exactly a prescription for exciting new ...”

“... of the University in the 16th century that is uncommon in productions by diverse hands. His long-standing interest in the social composition of Oxford, and his familiarity with some of the contributions of the social sciences to the history of education, have enabled him to pull many of the chapters together, and he has produced three good ones of his ...”

“... with Darwin’s revolutionary ideas. Huxley was at first hesitant about the idea of evolution and long remained sceptical of the mechanism of natural selection. But woe betide anyone incautious enough to attack his friend’s ideas from a position of religious orthodoxy or other unscientific prejudice: this bulldog could bite and did so with relish. He coined ...”

“... imported from the south, we find solemn assertions that tea yields a short-term high in return for long-term damage, while one 17th-century European convert to tea drinking, the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, who was on good terms with many China missionaries, says that his friends had to overcome his utmost suspicion before he consented to try it. Doubtless his ...”

“... early age. Where the Golden Horde has yielded to Alexander’s Ragtime Band why bother about so long ago, so very far away? Of course, such complacency may be premature. The late 20th century turns out to be full of the most unlikely surprises: in his introductory discussion of the concept of Inner Asia Denis Sinor laments the total disappearance of the ...”

“... original manuscripts to create a three-dimensional world: the storms of the sea voyage give way to long shots of the open French countryside; lively Parisian street scenes are interspersed with increasingly fruitless altercations between Hu and Foucquet; finally, there is a minute examination of the nine-by-12-foot space in which Hu was to pass most of his ...”

“... know more about this local potentate, Pu Shougeng, one of the most remarkable figures of his age. Long ago the Japanese scholar J. Kuwabara established that Pu Shougeng’s family was not even Chinese, but of Arabic descent, and yet, after recovering from a series of commercial setbacks, this Muslim trader turned admiral turned administrator came to dominate ...”

“... more squeamish, but the warriors of that time would probably have accepted that the convoluted and long-drawn-out relationship between Genghis and his friend Jamuqa was a buddy-buddy story bound to end in tragedy. As for the death of his eldest son, Genghis, ‘a father concerned for the well-being of his family’ (Ratchnevsky) was surely as little above ...”

“... woman unhappily installed amid the gloomy respectabilities of Max Gate. Disillusionment had long since clogged the marital atmosphere. In 1897, she explained with her usual directness why she had come to dislike authors: ‘I get irritated at their pride of intellect.’ She had plenty of that herself, but her disjointed and unformed letters are a ...”

“... defend national honour. Such military weakness, especially in a country whose economy depended on long distance trade, strikes Tuchman as odd, even contemptible. In a long, leisurely review of two centuries of Dutch political history, she attempts to explain why Britain’s great commerical rival of the 17th century had ...”

“... the Crimea as their lost home. In the backwash from this tide some Europeans, too, were carried a long way from home, a motley selection of voluntary and involuntary flotsam and jetsam – Papal envoys, captured artisans, traders and professional soldiers – who traversed an empire of staggering size by Medieval standards, based on Central Asia but also ...”

“... Christchurch, New Zealand looks rather a long way away on most maps – somewhere in the bottom right-hand corner, usually – but one can tell, even from London, that the intellectual atmosphere at the University of Canterbury must be something very special, at least in historical studies. Somehow, whether because it perceives itself to be perched on the far edge of European expansion, or perhaps thanks to the comparative lack of distraction from archives in the immediate vicinity, its history department seems always to have encouraged a certain breadth of vision rare in other centres: one thinks, for example, of J ...”

“... but it has still managed to produce leaders whom, whatever their flaws, we can only respect. Not a long list, but one to which it would be fair to add the Dalai Lama, although unfortunately he disqualifies himself by revealing that he is not a bona fide 20th-century figure, but the 14th reincarnation of a personage who has been playing his part in history ...”

“... They depend on an odd fictional contract which ensures that we ‘believe’ in them only as long as we are allowed to doubt them. If there were no rules preventing our world from seeing theirs, their existence would be either disproved or demystified: the tale would then have no truth, or else no strangeness worth the telling. After his return from ...”

“... on the close connection between Socratic argument and Socratic moral theory is the product of a long development in Vlastos’s own views. He mentions that his earlier work did not recognise the constructive role of Socratic cross-examination. The conception of moral argument which he now attributes to Socrates is close to the conception that now (after a ...”