“... of his life (usually, grievous to say, a successful period), a man may suddenly feel it Within His Power to confess that he cheated on his final exams at college, he may even choose to reveal that between the ages of 22 and 24 he was sexually impotent, but these gallant confessions in themselves are no guarantee that we’ll find out whether he once got piqued ...”

“... to Armageddon we’re reckoned to be. In the beginning, when the US was the world’s only nuclear power, holding only a few atomic bombs, the clock was set at seven minutes to midnight. In 1953, with both the Soviet Union and Britain joining America as nuclear states, and with the introduction of thermonuclear weapons, it was advanced several minutes. Since ...”

“... but writing at the scale of one person can obscure other stories with superior explanatory power. The most memorable and well-drawn characters in The Glass Universe turn out to be ye olde Money and Chance. Sobel begins her story with a dinner party at a mansion on Madison Avenue. The hostess, Mrs Draper, is an heiress, the host, Mr Draper, an ...”

“... man who reaches out for another unnecessary piece of cheese, all have reason to complain of the power of sight, above all other senses, as the occasion of actions which, however rationalised, have irrational roots. Trevor-Roper’s anatomy of unclear sight is, like Burton’s anatomy of melancholy, compendious. Although his book, unlike Burton’s, is a ...”

“... substance only as members of the new office-holding and courtly nobility that grew up under Henry VIII and Edward VI. The standard of living to which they then grew accustomed became a heavy burden under Elizabeth, whose favours to the family were intermittent and grudging. From the late 16th century to the late 17th – from the time of Sir Philip ...”

“... and his girlfriend Aubade lie around, immobilised, thinking about the Laws of Thermodynamics, Henry Adams, heat death, and the imminent decline of all energy. It is a mostly charming, sometimes tiresome showoff piece, but the way it is laid out offers, as does the apartment itself, a neat diagram of how in the novels Pynchon apportions things on a more ...”

“... The James who stated that the modern equivalent of a Donatello statue is not something by Henry Moore but a drop-head Lamborghini was only exaggerating a dearly held truth: that the idea of Two Cultures is as silly a notion today as it would have been when Donatello and Brunelleschi were working in Florence. To the rationalism of the Movement, Clive ...”

“... she set out to reverse colonial damage by making the larger language and culture of a former power (in this case French) sustain and invigorate the life of smaller ones, such as the songs of the Cham, a mountain people of Vietnam. More recently, she turned to the work of the poet Nelly Sachs, who chose to rinse her German in the waters of Martin Buber ...”

“... Speeches in her Mouth, which are capable of very bad Applications’); while, in the Champion, Henry Fielding ridiculed the ever expanding category of the unsayable with absurd elliptical contractions: ‘RT HNBL’ (‘right honourable’), ‘STTT’ (‘statute’) and ‘CVNT GRDN’ (no translation required).Jokes like these riffed on the rules of the ...”

“... into the mountain to pray, Himself, Alone.’ The title also reminded me of a revealing moment in Henry McDonald’s earlier biography (a mere 340 pages, published in 2000), when a friend describes bumping into Trimble in the law courts in Belfast on the day his divorce from his first wife was granted: ‘I remember being surprised to see him on his own. He ...”

“... as have ‘read’ it but might otherwise absentmindedly think that we are now talking about The Power and the Glory, I will quickly sketch the story, such as it is. It is really a cartoon, in the best sense, of one of those Southern families, decadent and decaying, who have since become almost a stereotype in the literature of the region, devoured by ...”

“... was an acknowledged masterpiece, produced such works as James Audubon’s Birds of America, George Henry Lewes’s Sea-Side Studies, Hugh Miller’s The Old Red Sandstone and innumerable commercial contemplations of flowers, shells and natural novelties. Alternately artistic and sentimental in impulse, the tradition of nature-appreciation inspired works that ...”

“... In 2006, a Treasury lawyer called Stuart Levey, drawing on the personal connections of his boss, Henry Paulson (the former CEO of Goldman Sachs), met with the heads of the world’s largest banks to warn them to cut ties with Iran. This again proved very unpopular: ‘You fucking Americans,’ one senior executive at the British bank Standard Chartered ...”

“... secular aims, enjoyed the backing of young Christian biologists such as William Carpenter, William Henry Flower and William Kitchen Parker. Never, he writes, was it simply a matter of Church-baiting rationalists triumphing over religious obscurantism: rather, a more subtle attempt ‘jointly undertaken by agnostics, deists and some Christians, to ...”

“... professional judgment, with its capacity for everything from paternalism to gross error. As Sir Henry Brooke (a judge) and Anthony Barton (a doctor and solicitor) point out in their chapter on consent to treatment, the stance adopted by any legal system at any point of time represents a choice, spoken or unspoken, between paternalism and consumerism. But ...”