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“... no other European country has ever had to undergo. Germany’s bout was a violent – sharp and short – push forward into social and economic ‘modernity’, driving it for ever from the halfway house of Weimar, in a painful dismantling of structures of political domination and social solidarity, feudal fetters which had held back the country’s ...”

“... in postwar Bulgaria (though some sources say he briefly visited the Soviet Union in 1937, during a short phase of Oxford student communism). From 1948 to 1956 he served in the Foreign Office’s secret Information Research Department, whose purpose was both to gather information about the Soviet Union (especially its misdeeds), and to disseminate it – in ...”

“... about Papal finances in the middle of the 17th century, than Krautheimer can accommodate in one short chapter. Some of what needs to be said has in fact been said in a recent doctoral thesis on ‘Popes, Prelates and Bureaucrats’ by Pieter Rietbergen of the University of Nijmegen. The section which Rietbergen devotes to Alexander, Bernini and the ...”

“... was sacred. He admitted that he now had to wrestle with the notion of sacredness which, a short time before, he would have brusquely dismissed. Literature was necessary, he argued, but we should not call it sacred lest we ‘become what we oppose’. Ten months after this lecture was published Rushdie was meeting the Islamic scholars and affirming the ...”

“... in her desire not to offend. The Queen Mother is lovable, the Queen is firm but warm underneath, Philip is wise and manly, Charles is the best of fraternal chums. Charlotte M. Yonge could not invent a nicer family than these Windsors. Brayfield, not to put too fine a point on it, is just as terrified as anyone else by the horsewhip and the punitive libel ...”

“... had irresistible appeal. Linking the Biblical story of the baptism of the Ethiopian by Philip the Evangelist (Acts 8.27-40) with such texts as ‘Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God’ (Psalm 68.31), they marked out an alternative tradition to the one which condemned them, as sons of Ham, to be perpetual ‘servants of ...”

“... was only a movie. The Philadelphia Story was written specifically for and partly about her by Philip Barry. It had a two-year run on Broadway, and (since Howard Hughes had bought her the rights) she starred in the film version for MGM. Quite apart from the life it portrayed, for a time The Philadelphia Story was her life. Many scripts were written with ...”

“... of its unconstitutionality but from Jacobite treason. By the same token, his Lord Chief Justice, Philip Hardwicke, was more concerned to link a crime wave in the 1730s with ‘the degeneracy of the present times, fruitful in the inventions of wickedness’, than with widespread human want and desperation. And there is an almost comical petulance in one ...”

“... from 1554 depicts Mary in the throes of this phantom pregnancy, shortly after her marriage to Philip II. The queen is shown seated rather than standing, in the tradition of portraits of Habsburg brides, and the partlet concealing her shoulders and neck follows the conservative fashion of contemporary Spain. She is 37. What’s striking is her ...”

“... in two distinctive ways. Her narrative starts with one foreign fleet in the English Channel – Philip II’s failed Armada of 1588 – and ends a century later with another: William of Orange’s invasion flotilla, which brought about the ‘Glorious Revolution’. Both 1588 and 1688 were moments of intense insecurity and both were presaged by the spilling ...”

“... utopia, the book has some supple, remarkably powerful readings to offer of Le Guin, Brian Aldiss, Philip K. Dick (‘the Shakespeare of science fiction’), A.E. Van Vogt, Kim Stanley Robinson and a range of others. Jameson has always been an energetic retriever of the neglected and maligned, and a brilliant salvage job here on Charles Fourier reflects this ...”

“... in the armed forces. And he was an enthusiastic collector of Abstract Expressionism, a friend of Philip Guston, and a correspondent of Robert Motherwell. He had already bought Hartigan’s August Harvest, which she had painted in Long Island the previous summer. He was interesting, and interested. He knew Hartigan’s world, but was not of it. He needed as ...”

“... of economic policy remind one alarmingly of the relationship between Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden in 1931: between a Prime Minister who senses that there is probably a better alternative but who lacks the authority or self-confidence to choose it and a Chancellor of formidable personality who is a rigidly orthodox practitioner of ‘this ...”

“... everything to do with the Cold War, it mutated in the imagination. As Greil Marcus suggests in his short study, the film ‘prefigured the sense that the events that shape our lives take place in a world we cannot see, to which we have no access, that we will never be able to explain. If a dream is a memory of the future, this is the future The Manchurian ...”

“... Europe’s other most senior Catholic, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, or with Charles’s son Philip II of Spain. Pierluigi Farnese, the eldest son of one pope during this time, was widely accused of raping a 24-year-old bishop, hastening the unfortunate young man’s death (Farnese was later murdered by subordinates of Charles V), while another Holy ...”