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“... feature of a neurone in the brain) or a biochemical property (such as the potency of an enzyme), may be imagined as occupying a discrete point on a metaphorical landscape that contains the array of all possible variants of that characteristic. In the case of a camel’s hump, for example, the landscape would contain humps the size of the Post Office ...”

“... wrong to think of its impact as a fortuitous calamity, like the Falklands adventure. Scargill may serve as a surrogate Galtieri so far as Thatcher is concerned, but she herself has supplied us with the crucial distinction between them in speaking of ‘the enemy within’ in July 1984. The phrase is a pregnant one, and not only in the sense that its ...”

“... this one, for which the small steps in question will seem like giant steps, for which they may spell the end of the road. We have been very grateful for the Arts Council’s encouragement. Together with the tremendous support which we have received from publishers, it has enabled us to build up a satisfactory circulation in the course of our five ...”

“... note. Far from being a divine visitation on lechery, herpes is a manageable minor affliction. It may, however, be easier for the righteous to approve, and more difficult for doctors to demythologise, the condition Dr Smith called ‘the gay compromise syndrome’, better-known as AIDS. This may sound like a brand name for ...”

“... are getting hotter. As the world collapses into what is conventionally called ‘anarchy’, it may be worth taking more serious thought about alternatives to the way we live now, and in particular about what is more correctly called ‘anarchy’. Conveniently, if coincidentally (and indeed curiously), a major Anglo-American publishing conglomerate has ...”

“... which Leonardo was working on at the same time as the Anghiari mural, and some flakes of what may be red lacquer. This harvest of particles is microscopic but substantial – in the sense that these are substances rather than theories and conjectures. Renaissance artists had their own jealously guarded recipes for paints and glazes – Leonardo was ...”

“... sage in point of approachability. To experience the sage, you must have read his work; the meeting may come later, and may disappoint. With the guru, personal contact matters most and the first encounter must succeed; the writing need only offer a clue to the presence. Paul de Man said enough memorable things to be quoted ...”

“... by what the markets would permit. One of Osborne’s first acts on entering the Treasury in May 2010 was to establish an in-house Office of Budget Responsibility, a kind of financial superego that would judge whatever fiscal announcements emanated from Whitehall. When Osborne told the Conservative Party conference in 2012 that ‘We’re all in this ...”

“... collapse of the market liberal order was underway at the time he gave his speech at the LSE. It may be that the programme he presented expresses deeply considered convictions. More likely, it reflects the workings of an acutely intelligent and at the same time highly conventional political mind. The market ideology of the 1980s Conservative Party has been ...”

“... if the purée is cash, and the aim is to give each person as good a life as possible, this end may not be well served by handing a person whatever income fills the gap between her actual earnings and, say, half the national average, or some other benchmark. As Amartya Sen has shown elsewhere, it’s not what you have that counts, so much as what you can do ...”

“... some killings, like the A-bombing of Japanese cities in 1945, are on a grand scale, and this, it may be said, makes them evil. But it is hard to credit that there’s some critical mass, beyond which the moral account tips – for some n, killing n civilians is bad, but n + 1 is evil. Of course, the progression could be sorites. Sorites shows that ...”

“... not, admittedly, that war as such is about to cease, but that ‘large-scale conventional war ... may indeed be at its last gasp,’ he must expect, in spite of his formidable reputation as a military historian, to be greeted with a certain degree of scepticism. Dr van Creveld has been almost as unfortunate in his timing as H.N. Brailsford. Within a few ...”

“... then? Well no, not quite. Eddy died in 1892 only weeks after he became engaged to Princess May (as the future queen was then known). We are invited to wonder whether his demise was deliberately accelerated by a doctor. Was it just coincidence that the young man took a dramatic turn for the worse directly after the arrival of the Queen’s ...”

“... echoes of Donne, Herbert, Quarles, Marvell, Horace, Ovid and others. Occasionally, a historian may wish he had considered other, less literary, sources: we may wonder, for example, whether the image of the river overflowing its banks in ‘The Advice’ owes anything to Strafford’s defence to Article Four of his ...”

“... computers, apps and storage systems that hold personal data. The new Data Protection Act passed in May defines personal data as any information relating to an identified or identifiable living individual; as well as our names, addresses and dates of birth, this now includes markers of our digital identities, such as IP addresses and biometric data. The new ...”