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“... Richard​ Holbrooke is the only American diplomat since the Vietnam War to have become a full-throttle celebrity, as likely to appear in the tabloids clutching a woman as putting forward a policy proposal in Foreign Affairs. In his thirst for publicity and enthusiasm for the pantomime of statesmanship, only Holbrooke’s nemesis, Henry Kissinger, compares ...”

“... invention would bring about for society’. Tesla’s first serious opportunity to exercise his powers of illusion came in the late 1880s with the War of the Currents, a ten-year struggle for market dominance in the emerging US electrical industry which pitted Edison’s direct current (DC) network against Westinghouse’s alternating current (AC). Though ...”

“... and Memoirs – had covers easily recognisable as ‘SF art’. The jackets were designed by Richard Powers, whose unmistakable paintings were usually found on Ballantine mass-market paperbacks by Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Clifford Simak and others. Powers’s designs screamed of the ‘paraliterary’, of ...”

“... writ, in response to what they saw as Protestant fundamentalism. As the French Oratorian scholar Richard Simon remarked early on in a book that became a subversive classic among Catholics and Protestants alike, ‘the Books of the Bible that are come into our hands are but abridgments of the ancient Records, which were more full and copious, before the last ...”

“... Act and praised the unelected and deeply corrupt Corporation. It possessed, he noted, the ‘full powers’ of local self-government, and had succeeded in ‘securing to every one of its citizens all the rights, and imposing all the obligations, of men free and equal before their fellow-men and before the law’. Toulmin Smith prevailed. In a fudge that ...”

“... circumstances. At the same time, however, culture can muster vigorous resistance to the dominant powers. This resistance is more likely to occur, curiously enough, once art becomes just another commodity in the marketplace and the artist just another petty commodity producer. Before that, in traditional or pre-modern society, culture generally serves as an ...”

“... in the United States – imaginatively reconstructing the ideas and actions of the imperial powers in the past can seem dangerously close to condoning racism, brutality and Eurocentricity in the present. The only valid questions about empire, in this view, are why so many Europeans were so complicit in such an obvious evil for so long, and how ...”

“... Richard Poirier, now in his middle sixties, seems to me perhaps the most eminent of our living literary critics, at least in the United States. He has a central position in contemporary American letters, as the editor of Raritan, the best of our quarterly reviews, and as the presiding spirit of the Library of America, the definitive publisher of the classic texts of the national literature ...”

“... now-failing button company) to the rich, self-satisfied, and extremely right-wing (even pro-Nazi) Richard Griffen. (Griffen is one of Atwood’s regular griffins, one might say, the monstrous male.) Richard is referred to by his enemies as ‘Mr Royal Classic’ – he is the owner of a successful firm called Royal Classic ...”

“... their Ottoman overlords that broke out in 1916, and which was a significant help to the Entente powers in their war against the Turks’ ally, Germany. But helping the Allies hadn’t been his main aim. What he had wanted was for the Arabs to take the opportunity of the war to seize power for themselves, in a great pan-Arab federation if possible. He ...”

“... in the work of major artists in their last years, to ask whether they give evidence of failing powers, such as might in the ordinary course of things be expected: senescence; illness; the decay of the senses; the certainty that death, always feared at a distance but now in the room, is taking a hand. Will these afflictions be reflected in a style markedly ...”

“... Tip 7 was not an act of God but an avoidable tragedy.These two submerged villages are central to Richard King’s oral history of Wales – or, really, of Welsh-language activism and Welsh nationalism – in the late 20th century. The injustices and catastrophes caused by the government in Westminster weren’t the only thing that stimulated Welsh activism ...”

“... survived as long as the Empire itself, but otherwise Seeley was neglected until in recent years Richard Shannon and Sheldon Rothblatt both identified him as a leading figure in the reorientation of the Victorian élite. Plainly there was scope for an intellectual biography to match the ideas to the man, and the task was undertaken as a PhD by Deborah ...”

“... Many people firmly believe there was. We owe the widespread belief that Robin lived in the time of Richard I (1157-1199) to William Stukeley (1687-1765), an eccentric scholar of ancient British history who fabricated for him a crazy family pedigree going back to the Normans. Knight argues that the search for the historical Robin is as quixotic as the search ...”

“... it was the religious anxieties and unanswered questions of this insignificant monk, not the great powers of the world against which elaborate diplomatic, legal and military defences had been erected, which brought ruin to the Pope, to the Church as it had been, and to Western Christendom. Luther was a ‘wonder man’, ‘incombustible Luther’, who not only ...”