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“... the meticulous administration which lay behind the glamorous crusading enterprises of King Richard Coeur de Lion in the 1190s, leaving him at least king of Cyprus, if not of Jerusalem. The Pipe Rolls of the English Exchequer, in the National Archives at Kew, are great clumps of feet-long parchment, which I remember from my research student days as best ...”

“... of Kuwait, it dawned on Washington that he was now in a position to help dictate the global price of oil, rapid action ensued with Operation Desert Storm. By March 1991, Saddam’s army had been soundly defeated and driven from Kuwait. The US then ordained an indefinite siege of the Iraqi economy, securing UN endorsement of comprehensive sanctions that ...”

“... have been finished, and is, in fact, a compilation made by others. It is, his excellent translator Richard Zenith writes, ‘a depository ... various books (yet ultimately one book), with various authors (yet ultimately one author)’. The narrator of most of the book – a series of diary entries and reflections, mostly undated and without context – sounds ...”

“... Madison’s caution, that ‘power is also opportunity, and to face danger with confidence is the price of its fulfilment.’ His polemical text, The American Presidency, concluded with a plea to give to the President ‘the power commensurate with the function he has to perform’. Only in this way could what he termed ‘the American adventure’ hope to ...”

“... It is not, he says, ‘the authoritative record of events put down as they actually occurred’. Richard Mullen and Hall use An Autobiography extensively, but tactfully (and sometimes tacitly) correct its account. Super, Mullen and Hall are skilled biographers, and each has his particular edge. Hall has edited the letters, and creates the most fluent ...”

“... connects Los Angeles proper to the even more suburban San Fernando Valley, much was written about Richard Meier’s architecture and Robert Irwin’s gardens. Remarkably little was written about the parking garage, though it’s the first structure you encounter on arriving at the Getty. (Theoretically, you could take a bus there, but this is, after all, a ...”

“... beween living national languages, like German, and dead languages like French. Fichte, a kind of Richard Wagner of linguistics, rejected such Latinate words as Humanität, Popularität, Liberalität, spread by the effete French and their revolution. Instead, he believed in coining vigorous, native words, expressing the living German soul. Watanabe makes the ...”

“... Jane Austen. True, her brother Frank had spent some months in Canton, and in Mansfield Park Fanny Price, that heroine of principle, had a copy of Macartney’s journal lying on her table, though whether his lordship’s refusal to kowtow to the Emperor stiffened her resolve not to act in the ill-fated ‘Lovers’ Vows’, or was meant to emblematise her own ...”

“... this outcome was less gratifying. It infuriated anti-revisionist stalwarts like Martin Malia and Richard Pipes, who consider that in 1991 their side won the Sovietological argument along with the Cold War, and that this victory should be duly acknowledged. Malia’s complaint that he has been marginalised in an academic field whose members refuse to address ...”

“... talent is as much a tribute to the post-war grammar school as it is to the wonders of Little Richard. Brought up by the bookish and financially comfortable Aunt Mimi, Lennon was shaped by the conflicts of the bright working-class kid in the grammar crammer. Selected to make social progress and clearly intellectually able, he instead devoted almost his ...”

“... they may do,’ the bibliographer Roger Stoddard has noted, ‘authors do not write books.’ Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell take up the distinction and declare that their volume will focus ‘on the representation, self-representation and non-representation, in literature, film and other cultural forms, of those who do write – manuscripts and ...”

“... controls that voice? What does it echo, in the long history of warfare examined by John Keegan and Richard Holmes in their book-of-the-television-series, Soldiers? It looks to me as if fighting men have adhered to perhaps half a dozen different codes. There is the ‘rape and pillage’ style: a gang of men sets off to plunder a wealthy place, seize ...”

“... Smith, Elder – was therefore paying thirty shillings, or 360 pence, i.e. 45 times the price of the original. Like a canny Victorian merchant, Browning picked up his raw material cheap abroad, manufactured it into fancy goods, and sold it at a premium in his home market. But the price of the book can only partly ...”

“... governments on corrupt and unrentable schemes: if the lira means the Mafia and Andreotti then, in Richard Nixon’s famous outburst of 1974, Fuck the lira! Accident alla lira! Meanwhile, a country excluded from monetary union – and this is the truly diabolical feature of the euro – will be forced by the capital markets to pay higher rates of interest, run ...”

“... Fukuyama has arrived at a similar conclusion, and among fictional characters, the heroine of Richard Condon’s novel The Final Addiction. Like them, Fisher insists that the ingenuity of global capitalism now flows into all the interstices of out lives, and that, with its sublime new products, it will revolutionise all our former assumptions. He declares ...”