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“... Man are the two ‘foundation texts’ of the English working-class movement. It is above all in John Bunyan, he argues, that we find ‘the slumbering Radicalism’ which was preserved through the 18th century, and broke out again and again in the 19th. Bunyan was born in a cottage on the edge of Elstow, a village near Bedford, in November 1628. His father ...”

“... is the current in a tuning circuit or the velocity of a weight suspended from a spring. The major difficulty in communicating scientific ideas to a non-professional audience, therefore, is the lack of a common mathematical language. Eigen and Winkler attempt to bridge this language gap. The concepts they aim to explain are not the relatively simple ...”

“... His father, who had served at Coruña and Waterloo, was a half-pay captain and briefly acting-major. As Major Jones, he existed on very small commons, while striving long and unhopefully to return to full pay. He had married for money, but it never materialised. He was not only sick, but on poor terms with the Duke, his ...”

“... in a tradition of Scottish eccentricity that includes James Hogg’s The Shepherd’s Calendar, John Galt’s ‘theoretical histories’ and Margaret Oliphant’s tales of terror. It’s common to think of Blackwood’s as a stolid redoubt of middlebrow English respectability, the kind of torpid organ invoked by Orwell in ‘England Your England’: ‘If ...”

“... which can be incarnated, realised in the historical persons of individual human beings? A major difficulty in seeing how to answer this question is an ambiguity, within the concept of authority itself, between the idea of social efficacy and the idea of moral or cognitive validity. By vulgarly quantitative criteria of social efficacy, two of the five ...”

“... around six in the morning to the sound of distant horses. Still in those days billeted in St John’s Wood the King’s Troop regularly exercised in Regent’s Park which would occasionally bring them along Oval Road and down the crescent. The ancient sound of horsemen carried in the early morning air so one would hear the troop long before they cantered ...”

“... withdrew, only to appear again at Lisburn barracks, where he identified himself as an intelligence major who had driven all the way from Armagh to Belfast to meet the new recruit. The major, Holroyd reflects in this book, ‘seemed to have no idea of what he was doing or why he was doing it’. These inauspicious early ...”

“... it comes from the heart of the political élite itself. The Commission was instigated by the late John Smith and conducted its work under the auspices and with the assistance of the Institute of Public Policy Research. The Institute also published the important working papers which preceded the Report. The Commission was carefully not tied to the Labour ...”

“... died at the age of 67 on 3 August 1924, the day following the 18th birthday of his younger son, John Conrad, the author of the present book. John’s memories, which reach astonishingly far back into his earliest childhood, begin with his family living in poverty in a tiny cottage, ‘a dark and gloomy place’, at ...”

“... the mouth of a stone lion located (for privacy) behind St Mark’s Cathedral. And, like Venice, a major source of economic strength lies not in Hong Kong’s limited area, or even in its diligent people, but in its role at the hub of a commercial empire – which, in Hong Kong’s case, consists of 50 million Overseas Chinese, reckoned the fourth or fifth ...”

“... links’. These were discussed in various forms by Hume, both James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill, Bain, and most effectively by Hartley. As Jeffrey Gray points out, a major impact of Pavlov’s work was to bring experiments to bear on philosophical notions of mind, rather as the great physicists have, over ...”

“... something more like contempt lurking beneath the surface. We are not weighty figures. No major critic on either side of the Atlantic has yet undertaken a serious study (Malcolm Bradbury’s slender introduction is the nearest approach). Many of Waugh’s English acquaintance have written brief, anecdotal accounts based on their memories of him ...”

“... The Auk, however, has always had his own champions: notably, his two previous biographers, John Connell and Roger Parkinson, and Correlli Barnett, who, in The Desert Generals (1960), went so far as to describe Montgomery’s Alamein as ‘an unnecessary battle’. Now Philip Warner has attempted a reassessment of Auchinleck’s career in the light of ...”

“... software that would enable them to dodge the Great Firewall of China – which blocks almost all major Western news sites and social media outlets – and browse the internet without restrictions. There was some surprise when it turned out that even elite students in China had little interest in finding out what Westerners were thinking. Only 53 per cent of ...”

“... Although Surrey’s surviving poems can be read in an afternoon, they represent a major achievement for someone whose life was cut short (literally: he was beheaded) at the age of 30. He invented blank verse, as well as the ‘Shakespearean’ form of the sonnet. His poems habitually dwell on isolation: they adopt the voices of Petrarchan lovers brooding on an inner hurt, prisoners lamenting past happiness, or psalmists threatening destruction to their enemies ...”