“... and dressed up again. This time, though, nobody laughed as we were all dressed up, in the suit, white tie, mortar-board and gown that were obligatory for the occasion. This was, I suppose, the last and most significant examination in my life and it was in this examination that I cheated, just as I had cheated a few years before to get the scholarship that ...”

“... of the 19th, and in the ‘creative illnesses’ of young intellectuals such as David Hume, John Stuart Mill – or Sigmund Freud. In fact, all these men suffered from hysteria: that is, if we subscribe to Micale’s line of reasoning, from an unacceptable femininity that the body of masculine medicine could only ‘repress’ and ‘exclude’ by projecting ...”

“... papers, and they come with all sorts of biases favouring papers in prestigious journals by white men from prestigious institutions. The chance of creating perverse incentives is also high. Tying core funding to grant income, for example, would prompt universities to put even more pressure on staff to chase grants than they do already.Researchers ...”

“... There have been active designers – Classicists like Adam, Goths like Pugin, Hellenists like Stuart and Modernists like Venturi, as well as historians (Ruskin, Pevsner, Banham) – who have had opinions on the future as well as the past of architecture. The emulating eye may be self-serving and envious, but it is also challenging and competitive. Goy and ...”

“... for the wider struggle; she writes approvingly of egalitarian marriages, such as that of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, but is less interested in – perhaps even a little suspicious of – women who were sexually free or who publicly challenged gender roles. She skates over the divisions in the movement, and rather than predict possible futures for ...”

“... took place over the convictions of the Cardiff Three, imprisoned in 1988 for the murder of Lynette White and released in 1992 (the real killer was imprisoned in 2003). Eight former police officers were due to be tried for ‘acting corruptly together’, but the case collapsed after evidence was lost (it reappeared a few months later). Three ...”

“... head and heart were held up to ‘shouts of joy’. Having witnessed this affirmation of Stuart power. Pepys went back to ‘my Lord’s’, collected two colleagues and bought them oysters at the Sun tavern. ‘After that I went by water home, where I was angry with my wife for her things lying about, and in my passion kicked the little fine Baskett ...”

“... natural selection, the programmed order of genes and the non-programmed ‘order for free’, as Stuart Kauffman has called it, generated within certain types of complex system. Historical contingency, too, has a role in the new synthesis. Simon Conway Morris has argued that if the Earth hadn’t been hit by the meteorite that probably made the dinosaurs ...”

“... readers. Twenty-five years later, himself caught up in an illicit relationship with a woman, John Stuart Mill was to write On Liberty, in which he identified a new species of liberty: freedom from the tyranny of public opinion. Ainsworth’s Turpin was attractive to his readers because he embodied precisely this freedom. In contrast, the rest of the ...”

“... behaviour might one day, in principle, be generated within the Internet. In The Soul of the White Ant (1937), the South African naturalist Eugène Marais painstakingly documented the natural history of the termites that build terminaries or ‘ant-hills’ on the open veldt. He astutely concluded that the terminary is a ‘distributed organism’: its ...”

“... Army girls in breeches, the iconography of militancy – all those columns of women in virginal white – looked quaint and dated. Worse, with daily casualty figures in the thousands, militant claims about male brutality and female suffering were not just unpersuasive but indecent. But the demise of the militants did nothing to rescue the antis. Mass ...”

“... of political theory. My favourite Indonesian fellow student in the mid-1960s was a middle-aged, white-haired historian called Soemarsaid Moertono, whom we all affectionately called ‘Mas Moer’. Mas is a Javanese term of address, a little more formal than ‘big brother’ but close to its meaning. He showed me the drafts of his MA thesis on aspects of ...”

“... a laureate of American empire, openly echoing Kipling as he urges his countrymen to take up the white man’s burden by fighting ‘the savage wars of peace’. He complained continually about Americans’ reluctance to embrace their imperial responsibilities and shed blood abroad. Like other stenographers for the national security state, he was appalled by ...”

“... them taken in Princes Street Gardens, in front of the view of the Castle, my mother is wearing her white fun fur jacket, my father is wearing a big smile; they look full of their moment and altogether content. No one knows why they went to Edinburgh, they just wanted to, and after that they went to Lourdes. My mother prayed at the grotto where the Virgin Mary ...”

“... taking him to the steam room in the Senate gym, where he met Jacob Javits of New York and Stuart Symington of Missouri: ‘They were standing there, two feet away from me, reaching out to shake my hand. And they were all as naked as the day they were born.’ It must be easier to reach across the aisle when you’re hanging out with your buddies in ...”