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“... Reich while Nazi rule rested on an element of consent from business, civil service and army. That held true even under the radicalising impact of war. The account here of an army that resisted the Commissar Order (to murder political commissars captured on the Eastern Front) and was not directly implicated in the work of murder squads of the Einsatzgruppen is ...”

“... years after finishing The Civilising Process, Elias’s professional life was fitful. He held a research fellowship at the LSE, moved to Cambridge with the rest of its staff during the war, and was later briefly interned as an alien on the Isle of Man (C.P. Snow helped to get him released). After the war he taught extra-mural classes in London, then ...”

“... One of these fragile mirrors, that ever doted on thine image, is about to be broken.’ Godwin held back the publication of Matilda, thinking its mixture of fact and fiction likely to be mischievous, but Shelley in the next year borrowed an idealised version of the same plot for ‘Epipsychidion’, the poem Mary Shelley would describe as his ‘Italian ...”

“... meals. Only at the actual burial did the successor reveal himself, and even then, he was not held to possess his full powers until crowned and anointed with holy oil at Reims Cathedral. In the 17th century, however, the Bourbon monarch abandoned these quasi-magical rites. Instead, they retreated into their royal palaces, where they developed the ...”

“... This is the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, and although its general principles are held true by all but a few mavericks, the notion of a truly point-like moment of creation – a singularity, in the lingo – has seemed unattractive to quite a few physicists, and there have been numerous attempts to construct cosmological models which conform ...”

“... It lost on all counts (this was the year of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor), as if held back by its own modesty. But go back to the film and you will find the astonishing Blitz sequence, which reproduces Boorman’s own boyhood wonder at the lightshow spectacular of the bombing raids – no matter the damage they did. In that rapturous ...”

“... all helped to bring Hitler to power in 1933. So did his own shrewdness as an organisation man who held the movement together in the lean years, then fended off the putschist hotheads. But the Hitler familiar from the newsreels, the demagogue, was decisively important. An embodiment of his Party’s dynamic appeal who came to be widely seen as a saviour, he ...”

“... we know what happens when politics falls apart, including Europe in the 1930s, which is often held up as a warning for what might be around the corner. Contemporary America is far more prosperous than other states where democracy has failed in the past, however unequally that prosperity is distributed. Its population is much older. Civil disorder tends to ...”

“... and its allies gained only 140 seats, despite topping the first-round poll. The rump centre right held on to its fifty seats. The ‘clarification’ called for by the president has instead produced unprecedented confusion, with no discernible majority or significant plurality.In the short run, the only certainty is instability. Any minority, coalition or ...”

“... Adjustment, no matter how comfortable it appears to be, is never freedom.’ David Reisman said that in The Lonely Crowd, a work of academic/pop sociology, published in the US in the late Forties; much read and remarked on at the time, and now forgotten. I looked it up the other day when I was due to say something at the South Bank Centre in connection with the Cities on the Move exhibition at the Hayward ...”

“... core which has increased in relevance with the passage of time. Such, at any rate, is the theme of David Reisman’s two volumes of intellectual biography and analysis – the most careful and thought-provoking exegesis yet to appear. Crosland was a man of contradictions, as Reisman shows, a hedonist who was also a puritan, and so on. Perhaps the biggest ...”

“... feeling inside the House of Commons that it was failing the country. In 1830 there was a widely held conviction that government without more popular legitimacy would lack the strength, confidence and expertise to manage a turbulent, complex and increasingly urban society. In 1865 and again in 1880 most Liberals could not tolerate the idea of governing with ...”

“... gone wrong, renewed, consummated, young, forbidden, discovered, doomed, forgotten, repressed. David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars is the latest literary bestseller to hit the US (and, remarkably, the UK). Its surprising success owes much to the strength of its narrative, and something to the dynamics of contemporary bookselling and the vogue of the ...”

“... at a discount of 50 per cent. Coming under fire at a meeting of the Independent Publishers Guild, David Kneale, the managing director of Waterstone’s, reminded delegates that ‘we have shareholders and have to make a profit.’ He changed tack later, insisting that his first responsibility was to his staff (that wouldn’t include Robert Topping, of ...”

“... has a telos: the fulfilment of the prophecy that the Messiah would be a descendant of the House of David. This precludes the pyrotechnic genealogical loops of the pagan gods, but it also illustrates the problem of genealogy more generally. Where to start and who to include? The Gospel of Luke takes the lineal patriarchal story back to Adam, which makes us all ...”