“... that ‘evil intent’ should be strictly irrelevant to the definition and punishment of crime may have gained a hold in criminological circles, but there are few signs of its acceptance among the people at large (and its creeping penetration into sentencing procedures may well have helped to deepen widespread popular ...”

“... consumerism, an age whose dominant trope is anti-climax. ‘On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost’ may nonetheless seem to confirm the stock views of Marvell and Milton: Marvell stands apart from the sublime solemnity of his friend, ironically distancing himself from his achievements. According to T.S. Eliot, Milton’s Puritan republicanism destroyed his ...”

“... on his khaki shirt: he is wearing the B.P. hat – to which American boys are fully entitled. Robert Baden-Powell, a skilled dress-designer, ordered those cowboy hats from the States in 1900 when he was kitting out his nurses and constables in Africa. B.P. has recorded: ‘They were known in the trade as “Boss of the Plains” or ...”

“... is in for the kind of bashing which Posner delivers in one of his chapters to the writings of Robert Bork. President Reagan’s capable and ultra-conservative nominee for the Supreme Court whose rejection by the Senate resulted instead in the appointment of Clarence Thomas. Although legal literalism can crop up almost anywhere, its sharpest American ...”

“... and dates while denying what they were most anxious to convey: fear, horror and loathing. Sceptics may conclude that just as there was, to quote the exhibition’s accompanying book, a ‘19th-century view of the Vikings purely as raiders and killers’ – a view powered by the Victorians’ readiness to see themselves, their navy and the British Empire as a ...”

“... the editors of the three slim volumes that make up the collected Letters frankly tell us. Editors may be happy to leave it at that, but unfamilial biographers are less inclined to do so. Speculation is made to fill the blanks which Hallam Tennyson has created for posterity. Typically, the speculation shadows the spirit of the age. In 1904, influenced by Max ...”

“... in the 19th century. If this was whig history it affected tories in quite the same way. The layman may well wonder why work should still be done on the history of Parliament, that olive whose oil has surely long since been pressed from its desiccated flesh. There have in fact been three distinguishable phases in modern historians’ treatment of the ...”

“... The Origin of Species a day. By the time you read this, the project will be nearly done, though it may take another year to align the bits of sequence and fill in the gaps. As the most visible (and expensive) product of Big Biology, the human genome project has understandably attracted much public attention. The excitement stems not from decoding the genome of ...”

“... white rather than the right stuff. The cocaine literature of the era reflected these attitudes: Robert Sabbag’s Snowblind (1976) was a gonzo-inflected account of how one man, Zachary Swan, single-handedly turned southern California onto coke; and while there’s plenty of nastiness in the tale (how could there not be?), the overall impression Sabbag gives ...”

“... his peers. In recent years Bossy has undergone a process of reversion, however. In our dreams we may encounter, disturbingly, old flames of many years ago, or other reminders of the persons we once were. Bossy’s original work, back in the 1950s, was on the French connection: the cross-Channel traffic not in drugs but in Catholicism, and it is to that first ...”

“... with preachers of the ‘white man’s burden’ school of belief in benevolent empire, among them Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, with their self-serving fairy tales about a post-Vietnam US internationalism organised around ‘complexity’, ‘interdependence’, ‘regime theory’ and ‘liberal institutionalism’. But his main focus is Gramsci, who as ...”

“... Anthony. In the same year Sarah’s elder sister Martha married a well-to-do young solicitor, Robert Roscoe, who had been one of their first lodgers at Southampton Buildings. This was an excellent match from the Walkers’ point of view, one they were no doubt keen to repeat for Sarah, now in her late teens, and their other children, Micaiah ...”

“... become the target of unreasonable blame. The second, sometimes contingently related dream is what may be called the fantasy of the middle ground. This depends, logically as well as practically, on the model of a spectrum. The spatial metaphor exerts its own semantic pull, and so those placed at either extreme of the spectrum must be described as ...”

“... the Supreme Court has been gathering momentum for almost twenty years: the nomination battles over Robert Bork in 1987 and Clarence Thomas in 1991 were harbingers. But times have changed since these bitter contests. Bork was a cutting-edge neo-conservative of the 1980s, but his successors may well go far beyond him, striking ...”

“... call him an artist. This suggestion, under the rapid wit of the dialogue and the scene shifts, may have done most to compel the admiration of the first grateful viewers of Citizen Kane. Welles’s own ‘presence in the picture’, Otis Ferguson wrote, ‘is always a vital thing, an object of fascination to the beholder. In fact, without him the picture ...”