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“... Boston University. The first of them, a satirical attack on The Old Faith and the New, a work of David Strauss’s dotage (1871, English translation 1873), begins with a memorable disclaimer. The German public’s eagerness to infer from the military victory over France a victory over French culture, Nietzsche writes, is a pernicious delusion, ‘not simply ...”

“... of state patronage under Stalin. However, the sculptural traditions to which both regimes gave vital support were vigorous. Ivan Shadr’s colossal head of Gorky of 1939, again in the first room at the Hayward, is inconceivable without the wild-haired Beethovens by Alfredo Pina and Bourdelle, which in turn depend on Rodin’s Balzac. But it has its own ...”

“... at the most optimistic estimate, by around 400,000 by 1984. Moreover, as he acknowledges, one vital element – incomes policy – has not been taken into account in the evaluation of the strategy. Desai also envisages restrictions on the growth of private consumption and a deliberate effort to divert investment into growth industries while phasing out ...”

“... heed for the patience of their readers; both are a touch paranoid (Page asserts that paranoia is a vital factor in the make-up of a good journalist); both inspire a sort of irritated affection in those who work for them; and both have a high success rate in defending libel actions. (One of the first rules is never to offer anything for free. In the New ...”

“... and by Metsu among the other Dutch painters who could invite the light with such vital magic. Colour has the same brilliant irrelevance to Cartier-Bresson’s works as it has to Picasso’s Guernica: all impassioned tints and hues are distilled into black and white and their varying combinations and relations. Cartier-Bresson has lately given ...”

“... Unionists as parochial know-nothings. Revisionist historians, most prominently Ian McBride and David Livingstone, have demonstrated that the history of Ulster Presbyterianism from the 18th century is characterised by intellectual richness, an openness to science, a commitment to progress and a taste for theological heterodoxy, notwithstanding backwoods ...”

“... am very bad at what I am not good at,’ for example, or ‘Croce, in particular, played a vital role in making me feel better about being mentally undeveloped.’ There’s also a fair amount of straightforward bragging: ‘Nowadays, if I am learning to read a new language, I … ’ and so on. Quite a lot of it is concentrated in the third ...”

“... in the Scotland of the Covenanters – the early 17th-century Calvinist International had been a vital and pluralistic phenomenon, and far from singlemindedly Calvinist. Trevor-Roper’s real task in his purported biography of Mayerne is the recovery – through the lens of one particular case-study – of a ‘lost moment’ in intellectual history, the ...”

“... chieftains, brought to London to ratify a colonial treaty, were taken to a performance in 1710. David Garrick, reviving the play in the 1740s, played Macbeth in the modern red coat of a Georgian general, so that he looked quite like the Duke of Cumberland, known after his treatment of prisoners taken at Culloden as the Butcher of the Scots. The play only ...”

“... a Libyan tribe that controlled virtually all trans-Saharan trade. Recent British fieldwork, led by David Mattingly, has demonstrated that this civilisation, in an area where average annual rainfall is less than 10 mm, practised intensive agriculture supported by qanats (locally called foggaras): underground tunnels that tapped an aquifer in the slopes of an ...”

“... that ‘a thin line of settlements along the Jordan would not provide a viable defence … The vital strategic issue was how to give depth to the coastal plain … The answer was to build a [network] of urban, industrial settlements.’ Likud had just won the election and as a result of Israel’s failure to predict the imminence of the 1973 war, the ...”

“... He makes clear that mobs, mafias and global rackets are often performing useful and occasionally vital social functions that no other institution – governments, legal systems, the police, the economy itself – is capable of providing. It’s usually assumed that organised crime is a network of unqualified evil: murderous, recklessly greedy, the enemy of ...”

“... liquid bottle (‘cleans, no added promises’) on a fire. Words rear up and loom enormous – David Cameron, for example, may find this with his plan for ‘thrifty government’ – and fizz and collapse and make a nasty smell. It is, I take it, obvious that one of the many things no one particularly needs at the moment is a book that tells you how to ...”

“... He then turns to Raphael Samuel’s interviews in Stevenage in 1959-60 and John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood’s surveys in Cambridge and Luton in the early 1960s to trace the way migration to the ‘new towns’ and rising prosperity affected those attitudes. Next he mines the questionnaires gathered by researchers working with Richard Brown on Tyneside ...”

“... had two rooms, kitchen and bathroom – what East European biographer could fail to give this vital information?)Antisemitism, largely absent from Bauman’s life since 1939, re-entered it in the early 1950s, as suspicion of Jews mounted in East European and Soviet communist parties. In 1952 a confidential report on Bauman’s army work noted ...”