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“... on Rikers, in 2014, after taking part in a protest against the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. His book is an account of New York City politics from the 1950s to the early 1990s as seen through the lens of the city’s jails. Two competing visions of social order emerge, with humanistic liberals promoting ‘penal welfarism’ on the ...”

“... and for a new centrist political party appears to have been driven by her infatuation with Lord Robert Cecil (Holmes doesn’t make entirely clear whether this was romantic). ‘I do not approve of extremes in politics,’ she wrote. ‘I distrust Revolution on the one hand and Reaction on the other, and I believe we ought to pursue a middle course.’ She ...”

“... traditional powers had never been seriously in question. To borrow the binary categories of Niall Ferguson, ‘towers’ prevailed over ‘squares’. Hierarchies beat networks. Power prevailed over ideas and arguments. The effort to make sense of this outcome gave rise to one of the most interesting and important intellectual consequences of the ...”

“... There is no hard evidence, and the soft evidence is very soft indeed. Traditionally, Adam Ferguson has been promoted as the likely author. All that seems clear is that it was someone who admired Gilbert Elliot of Minto and was annoyed by Robert Dundas of Arniston, second Lord President. Quite a lot of Scottish ...”

“... that was it. A stock vision of undergraduates then (gleaned from movies like A Yank at Oxford with Robert Taylor) was of a young man in dressing-gown and slippers, a towel round his neck en route for the distant baths. I didn’t run to a dressing-gown and slippers either: ‘Nobody’ll mind if you just wear your raincoat,’ my mother reassuringly said. I ...”

“... colonial past are over.’ No matter that Britain had never apologised: like his fellow Scot Niall Ferguson, Brown wanted British people to feel proud of their empire. At a conference in 2006 on ‘the future of Britishness’, Brown outlined an American-style patriotism, provoking even David Cameron, newly appointed as Tory leader, to object: ‘We’re not ...”

“... to pastoral to agricultural to commercial forms of society, Scott absorbed from Adam Ferguson and Dugald Stewart and mapped onto his re-creation of the conflicts between Highlands and Lowlands, clan and capital, in Waverley and its sequels. It was Scott’s capacity to represent the tragic collision between historically distinct times and their ...”

“... of the first grateful viewers of Citizen Kane. Welles’s own ‘presence in the picture’, Otis Ferguson wrote, ‘is always a vital thing, an object of fascination to the beholder. In fact, without him the picture would have fallen into all its various component pieces of effect, allusion and display. He is the big part and no one will say he is not worth ...”

“... For​ the late French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Thomas Robert Malthus was an indispensable guide to the agrarian past. Le Roy Ladurie applied Malthus’s argument that population grows faster than subsistence to the archives of Languedoc, where, in the empirical detail of parish registers, cadastral surveys, tax rolls and price series, he perceived ‘the immense respiration of a social structure’ over the course of three centuries ...”

“... circumstances’ – in other words, that it was their rearing which freed them for it. That Adam Ferguson did less original thinking, in Camic’s eyes, is because his student life was passed at St Andrews, backward in clinging to regenting. Knee Deep in Claret has nothing of the intellectual aspirations of these two books, but again it displays Scottish ...”

“... to the textbook view that John Locke’s contractual theory of government simply demolished Robert Filmer’s efforts at assimilating the authority of kings and fathers, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government did not drive patriachal ideas out of circulation. Indeed, it was Locke who was hardly read in the early 18th century: his ideas struck no ...”

“... in The Citizen Kane Book), which argues the case for Mankiewicz’s authorship, but on Robert Carringer’s The Making of Citizen Kane (1984), which takes the question of collaboration further still and stresses the decisive influence of financial, legal and other contingencies. When told the thesis of Carringer’s book, Welles responded ...”

“... the field for quite a few years, but more recent historians have sought to push him aside. Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War (1998) argued that ‘no evidence has ever been found by Fischer and his pupils that these objectives existed before Britain’s entry into the war … All that Fischer can produce are the prewar pipedreams of a few pan-Germans and ...”

“... that ruled Africa and Asia don’t seem quite as bad. The perplexingly affirmative work of Niall Ferguson and David Armitage scants, if it doesn’t actually trivialise, the suffering and dispossession brought by empire to its victims. More is said now about the modernising advantages the empires brought, and about the security and order they ...”

“... over the years with an admiration that has often seemed to catch the admirer by surprise: Otis Ferguson, a reviewer who never puffed, thought Stewart in The Shop around the Corner ‘a young American with as broad and unaffected a base in a country’s experience as Huck Finn’. It has been the way of critics, and the habit on the whole of ...”