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“... considerations – so platitudinous that they make dreary rehearsing – Simon believes that our powers of making clear statements in English will be impaired if we admit most new usages. It might just be, by an astonishingly remote chance, that contemporary English as defined by the books is the most efficient language that has ever existed. But we have no ...”

“... in the trenches settled for a career as a big-time embezzler. Young Eric quickly developed his own powers as a con-man, though he had no need to use them to seriously illegal ends. R.M. Ballantyne was his first literary love; a later one was Newth’s Inorganic Chemistry. He made a very ambitious wireless, and carried off a top university scholarship with ...”

“... homologous clitoris) and females very often create their own versions by artificial means. The powers that select for organs of reproduction and pleasure may, it is argued, be simply peripheral – the icing on the cake of a brutal natural order that is brought into existence by much more impressive forces. Males are stronger, males are more capable, and ...”

“... who drink it can never leave the city again. ‘In the Fifties the loss of the water’s magical powers was cruelly demonstrated when Alfredo di Stefano was photographed drinking from the Canaletes fountain just after signing for Barcelona Football Club. A few months later he was playing for Real Madrid.’ Vazquez Montalban notes, too, beyond the joke, how ...”

“... the 19th century were often credulous, but they were not submissive, and generally they knew the powers of the critical mind in a way the more dutiful English did not. What the English didn’t know, and perhaps didn’t want to know, was the force of what James called the American people’s ‘only decidedly original contribution to the systematic ...”

“... though occasionally charged. The migrants got along under the colonial regimes, dealing with powers as they found them. Later, during the struggles for independence and after, this sometimes cost them dearly. Nationalists inveighed against those who worked with the British and the Dutch, were friends of the colonials and not true Indonesians or ...”

“... Congress of Berlin, which catalysed the recognition of the Congo Free State by the European powers. In Twiss’s view, the Knights of Malta, the Hudson’s Bay and East India Companies, and Rajah Brooke, the British adventurer who founded a dynasty in Sarawak, were all examples of private enterprises that had absorbed or created sovereignty, becoming ...”

“... in earnest would compound their already serious national security problems, enabling hostile powers to manipulate the new political parties that liberalisation would bring. It isn’t that such regimes are entirely unreformable. But qualitative political reform can only come about if they are put under sustained pressure by effective movements from below ...”

“... a suit for his canonisation. Diarmaid MacCulloch doesn’t invoke Chesterton’s miracle-working powers, but he opens this expanded version of his 2012 Gifford Lectures with a Father Brown story, ‘The Oracle of the Dog’: by howling at a certain time, the animal gives the priestly sleuth the clue to the murder weapon. Chesterton was consciously taking off ...”

“... the stage a melodrama based on Caleb Williams; and a just appraisal of Mrs Siddons’s superior powers as a performer. We hear of her brother, with his poor singing voice, ‘murdering’ Grétry – the word is the Irish tenor Michael Kelly’s – and we witness a number of total theatrical flops, which have always ...”

“... were reduced from 402 to 157 seats, and then by the Parliament Act of 1911, which clipped the veto powers of the House of Lords. Between 1912 and 1914 Ulster Unionists and their fellow diehard anti-Home Rulers appeared to flirt with insurrection and civil war. The Tory leader, Andrew Bonar Law, declared in a speech at Blenheim in 1912 that he could ‘imagine ...”

“... convention, Sir Henry Maine’s status and contract, Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Michael Oakeshott’s ‘Societas’ and ‘Universitas’, Durkheim’s ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’ solidarity, and Hobbesian vertical ‘command’ models of authority v. Lockean theories of popular ‘consent’. Bertrand Russell described his ...”

“... visit to the clinic. The rest of the novel consists of dialogue between Alicia and her doctor, Michael Cohen, taking place over several sessions in the weeks leading up to her suicide. By comparison with The Passenger, with its cryptic lapses into memory, dream and flashback and all its dangling plot threads, Stella Maris is alarmingly ...”

“... I am going to bestir myself in your interest – if my credit is of any value with the ruling powers. And that was what happened, for the next twenty-five years. Churchill levered Spears into politics, first as National Liberal Member for Loughborough, next as Conservative Member for Carlisle. In his wilderness years, Churchill used Spears as his ...”

“... Richard Purdy (‘incapable of psychological insight into sexual matters’) and Michael Millgate (‘prim’), the devoted Hardy scholars who have given us studies of the work, an edition of the letters and several biographies. In an argument never explicitly stated in the book itself, but proclaimed in the press release and summarised on ...”