“... wigs have been largely but not wholly abandoned. Canada dropped them long ago, New Zealand more recently. In Australia’s modern federal court they were initially worn, then abandoned; but in its state supreme courts the full English regalia are still worn. American judges were long ago steered away from wigs by ...”

“... through his eye sockets.’ Plus, the hoods we all thought were worn by executioners were more often worn by those about to be executed. Hooded prisoners were not only less likely to resist but less likely to elicit sympathy from their accusers or executioners. Rather surprisingly, given Kinney’s extraordinary range of reference – from online ...”

“... had never been much of a student (he lied about his college degree), but he pored over Thomas Jefferson’s original rules for the House of Representatives:Reading through my three-inch-thick, hardback copy, I came across a line that said that ‘privileged motions’ could be brought to the floor at any time, by any member. It didn’t matter how ...”

“... historians and social anthropologists were quite minimal: this makes the subsequent change all the more remarkable. In 1966 a conference of social anthropologists held in Edinburgh was devoted to the theme of ‘History and Social Anthropology’; the Proceedings contain contributions by six anthropologists and two historians. The anthropologists refer only to ...”

“... novel, Goodbye Columbus. He has written eight others since. Admirers will want at least as many more, but in the new novel he seems to be suggesting that he has already offered them the makings of a whole career. He may even be giving an intimation of reduced activity in the future, of a last period already reached. The trouble with trying to think of ...”

“... Paris in December 1896, ‘a popular legend of base instincts, rapacious and violent.’ ‘What more is possible?’ W.B. Yeats, who was in attendance, recalled in his autobiography. ‘After us the Savage God.’ Was the uproarious Ubu an early intimation of his ‘rough beast’ slouching towards Bethlehem? Ubu roi is also a Second Coming of sorts, and ...”

“... scratching that accounts for the monkey’s having it.) The worry about consciousness is that, in Thomas Nagel’s resonant phrase, there is ‘something that it’s like’ to be a conscious creature, but there is, presumably, nothing that it’s like to be a tree; and there is surely nothing that it’s like to be a rock or anything else that is ...”

“... spires and all the things that lived along the Thames; the early drawings show experiments with a more sail-like structure, a right-angled pyramid, dynamically spiralling upwards but tethered to the urban surface. You can still see this conceptual Shard in the building there today, with its deconstructed summit a refraction of Hawksmoor, and making it look as ...”

“... as unlucky to dislodge, actually the site of an Iron Age enclosure’. I thought the English were more hard-headed than this, that it was the superstitious Irish who didn’t dislodge fairy forts for fear of reprisals from the gentle folk, a term not included by Dolan, though it does appear in the 1996 Concise Ulster Dictionary edited by C.I. Macafee, which ...”

“... and sometimes, in the 20th, that Continental essayistic tradition which permits a writer like Thomas Mann or Jacques Rivière to produce a kind of fattened philosophy. During the Fifties, Murdoch exchanged her Existentialism for a loosely Christian Platonism, which has been the fabric of her worldview ever since. (Her Gifford Lectures, published as ...”

“... band of Pioneers, who are opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent’. More than three thousand copies of The Pioneers were purchased within hours of its publication on 1 February 1823, establishing Cooper as by far the most successful American novelist of his time. The following year the Atlantic published an imaginary dialogue ...”

“... marble busts on the walls. I noticed Ascherson was taking his time over an inscription to the poet Thomas Campbell, and some words of Campbell’s began to echo somewhere in my head, two lines from The Pleasures of Hope. ‘Tis distance lends enchantment to the view, And robes the mountain in its azure hue. Not good lines, but they seemed good enough as I ...”

“... That is, after all, only to say of writing what is true of any human action: intentions are a lot more complicated and people less self-acquainted than you might think.But Lawrence was referring to something more mysterious than that. He was saying that the tale and its artist are intrinsically opposed to each other, that ...”

“... that the Smith of Mapplethorpe’s photo belongs to the same blithe, peppy era. She seems more real than the crinkly tinfoil stars of the time, but also a thousand times more fantastic. Think of all those 1970s prog rock sleeves and their multicoloured worlds of sauciness and sorcery – then switch to the stark ...”

“... The​ Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus liked to look on the bright side. True, that hasn’t been the usual assessment: his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was intended to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government ...”