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“... more tenacious, ruthless and monomaniacal. On Wikipedia, it’s the good guys who will hunt you down. Wales thinks this tells us something surprising and reassuring about human nature. ‘Generally we find most people out there on the internet are good,’ he says. ‘It’s one of the wonderful humanitarian discoveries in Wikipedia that most ...”

“... dared to print the name of the head of MI6, Christopher Curwen. The heads of the CIA and the KGB, William Casey and Victor Chebrikov, are of course public figures. But that, as Mr Ingham would say, is not the point. What the point is remains obscure. In 1932 the novelist Compton Mackenzie was tried for a number of breaches of the Official Secrets Act which ...”

“... out how the popes piped fresh water to their city and sewage away from it.* Lawrence Principe and William Newman (Alchemy Tried in the Fire, 2002) and Pamela Smith (The Making and Knowing Project) have decrypted arcane manuscripts and recreated forgotten crafts to establish how alchemists and artisans actually did their work, which they then ...”

“... so promising – or tantalising – to psychiatrists is, to use the term Michael Pollan takes from William James, their noetic quality. As James described this peculiar aspect of religious experience, ‘People feel they have been let in on a deep secret of the universe, and they cannot be shaken from that conviction.’ Psychedelic experience, too, has this ...”

“... where his father farmed nearly two hundred acres, rode to hounds, and with his wife went to hunt balls. Herbert, who for the only time in his life was called Bertie, remembered the period as idyllic when he wrote about the farm, the orchard, the cow pasture and the blacksmith’s shop in the delicate, charming fragment of autobiography The Innocent ...”

“... that the reader is given is filtered through Miriam in a style that Sinclair, borrowing from William James, labelled ‘stream of consciousness’. Richardson loathed the term, calling it a ‘death-dealing metaphor’, but it remains an accurate description of the way in which associations of thoughts and emotions determine the movement of the ...”

“... here in 1990) borrows the form of a Chandleresque detective story for the tale of a hunt for a mutant Manchurian sheep with the ability to inhabit people’s minds. Having possessed (or ‘sheeped’) a soldier in the Imperial Army in the Thirties, it has turned him into an underworld Boss whose extensive outreach includes most of the public ...”

“... later version ‘richer, more complex’, like Jack Stillinger and Zachary Leader; or decide, with William Empson, that it has been mangled ‘for reasons of conscience’? It is not easy to make out what Coleridge thought about the unity of the self, but surely having a sense of it is consistent with occasional changes of mind. His practice suggests that he ...”

“... financial system. The gold standard was finally abandoned, and in 1974, the US Treasury secretary, William Simon, secretly travelled to Saudi Arabia to secure an agreement that remains to this day the foundation of the dollar’s global dominance. As David Spiro has documented in The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony (1999), the US made its guarantees of Saudi ...”

“... of Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation.’ This is unfair on the likes of William Whewell, the 19th-century British philosopher who gave the name ‘palaetiological sciences’ to disciplines that seek to give explanations, cause by cause, for the changes that occur in the natural and social worlds over time. Whewell thought these ...”

“... a note, ‘HH WH’, next to a telephone number. The investigators quickly suspected Howard Hunt, a former CIA agent who was employed as a consultant on special activities at the White House. Evidence soon pointed to the other accomplice at the lookout, Gordon Liddy, legal counsel to CREEP. The situation was complicated, because in some respects the ...”

“... just like organic viruses invading human hosts), he boards his techno-boat and sets out to hunt the hunter, ‘chumming’ the conceptual sea by tipping bucketfuls of text overboard in an attempt to lure the Ludovician near. There’s a lot of this conceptual currency going around in contemporary art schools, and to anyone familiar with the syllabuses ...”

“... English grammars were even, one might think self-defeatingly, written in Latin). William Lily’s Latin grammar, taught by royal decree in every English school for three hundred years, explained that in phrases like Rex et Regina beati, ‘the blessed King and Queen’, the adjective beati is plural (agreeing in number with Rex et Regina) and ...”

“... experiences of the First World War, was one of which writers were acutely aware. In 1926, Violet Hunt, who began to publish in the 1890s, described herself as the kind of New Woman people used to write about long ago, and her friend Rebecca West, who joined the staff of the Freewoman in 1911, as a prototype of the ‘Newest Woman’. The gap opens within The ...”

“... investigation of alleged Communist infiltration of Hollywood. Embarking on an anti-Communist witch-hunt, naming the names of hidden subversives and Red sympathisers among his former friends and associates, Reagan began, as he put it, ‘to find the rest of me’. The self so felicitously discovered acted out a fantasy of martial independence – he likes the ...”