“... so, too, is the story about the void. But the underlying materialist intuition continues to be plausible; everything is the same sort of stuff as familiar, ontologically untendentious objects like rivers, rocks and stars. The whole world is that sort of stuff in its myriad configurations. So construed, materialism is a sound bet on a research ...”

“... days’ observations of the Jovian satellites as he could without missing the deadline imposed by the most important opportunity for intellectual exchange in early modern Europe, the Frankfurt Book Fair. The pamphlet gestured to the possibility of using the satellites as a precise celestial clock, but relied on medieval merchant time to deliver its ...”

“... East or Central Asia were not worth fighting for. In Washington’s eyes, they were sideshows, to be, if not ignored outright, then allocated to diplomats or purveyors of dirty tricks rather than to soldiers. That somewhere like Afghanistan might be worth the life of even a single American would have struck residents of Des ...”

“... serious, that he conducted during their more than 30 years of married life (she died in 1927). By the early 20th century Wells was one of the most fashionable writers in Britain. He rode a bicycle. He looked forward to the formation of a socialist world state. He had many baths (he had en suite bathrooms installed in the house he built for himself at the ...”

“... David Vann’s novel – his debut, after a short story collection, Legend of a Suicide (2008), and a memoir, A Mile Down (2005) – is a book that makes Cormac McCarthy’s The Road read like a walk in the park. Compared to Caribou Island, The Road is grim-lit lite. After 200 pages of unrelenting misery, McCarthy breaks down and accepts the possibility of grace: after a long trudge through a post-apocalyptic landscape, a woman turns up on the last page, out of the blue, and says: ‘The breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time ...”

“... his account of English constitutional history. But in telling the story of the English monarchy, David Starkey found no occasion even to mention Cromwell’s name.* Now, with the publication of Robert Hutchinson’s biography of Cromwell, it is as if Beria has come back to haunt us, requiring a further revision of the Encyclopedia. And the analogy is not so ...”

“... urges of even older political and religious institutions: ‘Modern identity papers can in fact be described as the combined outcome of those techniques developed between the 13th and the 16th centuries.’ He establishes his case through an impressively wide range of examples, from government registers and ordinances to personal travel accounts from ...”

“... name for the unsettled and unsettling thing he took the language of the Eastern European Jews to be. ‘Jargon,’ he wrote, ‘is the youngest European language – barely four hundred years old and actually even younger. It has not yet developed forms of speech of such clarity as the ones we use. It is expressed curtly and rapidly . . . It has no ...”

“... And why are there pigs? ‘Nature loves beauty and delights in diversity: that is well shown by the tail of the peacock, for there nature makes it evident that the bird is born for the sake of the tail and not vice versa.’ ‘Pigs are born to be slaughtered, and god has added a soul to their flesh as a sort of ...”

“... Kipling is an easy man to dislike. He wasn’t much loved in his own time, apparently, even by people – schoolmates, for example, and neighbours in Vermont – with whom he thought he was rubbing along well. In his later years he lost many of the friends he had, except the most right-wing ones and King George V, who found Kipling the only literary figure he could get on with at all ...”

“... fads and the highbrows who prattled on about them. At a meeting of Edwardian Fabians attended by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb, Attlee whispered to his brother: ‘Do we have to grow a beard to join this show?’ The confident pre-1914 left, he later reflected, had been too rigid in its scientific approach to social problems and altogether ‘too ...”

“... seeme nothing … where before [a soldier] ever entered into the wars, he thought he could never be so cruell, as to dash the childrens braines against the stones … but afterwards when he was injured with warre, he did it.’ The civil wars of 1642-51 saw the greatest concentration of organised violence in the recorded history of the British ...”

“... the American political scientist Andrew Moravcsik wrote in the Financial Times that Brexit should be seen as a kabuki drama – ‘stylised but meaningless posturing’. Four years on, it is clear that nothing could be further from the truth. Even if the UK does manage to strike a deal with the EU, relations between the two ...”

“... it comes from the perception that England’s nationalism is crude, unreflective and cartoonish by comparison with the arguments put forward for Scottish independence. Even those of us who are instinctively anti-nationalist – wary of nationalist rhetoric, and the dangers it might bring – recognise that Scottish nationalism is much more sophisticated ...”

“... he wrote, ‘whether it is pleasure in play or pleasure in lifting inhibitions, can invariably be traced back to economy in psychical expenditure.’ The comedian Ken Dodd, who amassed a substantial library of academic books on the subject of humour, was fond of quoting this line from Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious in interviews and ...”