“... mind. So effective a freedom fighter was he, at least on one front, that his message and his books may now seem not much more than literary curiosities. He settled down in his own lifetime to being a well-known brand of licensed English eccentric, rearranging evolution and Shakespeare’s sonnets, proving that the author of the Odyssey was a woman, crossing ...”

“... our view,’ Eberts continues, ‘it was like Gone with the Wind.’ Only English. Some may feel the massacre at Amritsar was gratuitous violence, but that was English too. The Mission (one Oscar), on the other hand, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but failed to pull in audiences. Failed to pull in large enough audiences, that is, in proportion to ...”

“... fretting, singing and dancing! Wise Children will give pleasure to thousands of readers, and it may even have the added merit of conveying without tears a hard-fought slice of the National Curriculum. Angela Carter made her name with a series of novels set in a generic Wonderland; now she has moved to Theatreland. Her fantasy worlds range from the dystopian ...”

“... such an audience without being recognised, except perhaps as a character from The Darling Buds of May). ‘Like many others, I believe, unfashionable though it may be, in original sin. And there’s no shortage of that. But, as a Tory, I also believe, in every fibre of my being, in original virtue.’ Patten of course is a ...”

“... far from bringing us wisdom, the passing years make it hard for us to preserve what wisdom we may have had. The most famous account, alas, is that of the melancholic Jaques, with his lean and slipper’d pantaloon, and the ‘last scene of all’, second childishness. To which Philip Larkin has appended a later last scene: ‘... and then the only end of ...”

“... an example, for his Dimbleby Lecture, of the law’s ability to play a straight bat. A book may be lurking there, as it must in many other corners of the legal attic. Brian Simpson himself embarked on such an enterprise some years ago with the 19th-century case, known to every law student, of the Crown v. Dudley and Stephens – the captain and mate of ...”

“... stage-managed as some in recent years, but the fact that it was not patently stage-managed may have given it more credibility. No one would have, could have, or even should have, scripted John Prescott. The Conference had the sense of a real occasion, with real people engaged in a real political argument. This was the electricity which charged the key ...”

“... and other aid can do that with cholera, as with other such scourges, even while the death toll may in this case have to be dreadfully high. With generous and intelligent aid, epidemics can be handled, and we may well hope that this one will be. The larger problem comes afterwards: so what then? Current debate and local ...”

“... and at the close of the book offers a description of Chateaubriand’s Vie de Rancé that may well be meant as self-referential: ‘It was his final surrender to free – even wild – association, a perverse rummaging in his own memory that stirred up shadows among the ruins of time ... The prose juxtaposes facts, quotations, and recollections like ...”

“... Pynchon). Fifthly and lastly, the palimpsest history of a nation and creed, in which magic may or may not be involved but seems almost irrelevant – or shall we say almost natural – compared to the preposterousness of mankind as realistically described. This we find in Terra Nostra and The Satanic Verses. Consider ...”

“... gust of wind at a review was not. This misfortune befell the Duke of Wellington in Hyde Park on a May day in 1829. Much of the blame lay with his Guards bearskin cap, nearly two feet high, which he was wearing instead of his usual cocked hat. ‘Oh, what a falling off was there!’ exclaimed the caricaturist Paul Pry, showing the Duke in his white trousers ...”

“... the Teacher Training Agency, John Patten’s attempt to gain control of the training colleges, may serve for an example; and finally direct intervention, as symbolised by David Blunkett’s threat (Independent on Sunday, 23 February) to ‘lay down from the centre exactly how reading should be taught’. Hobbes would have known what to call this: it is ...”

“... of Athenian democracy or Spartan aristocracy; whereas there is a good deal to suggest that he may have approved of a limited form of monarchy. According to his friend Greville, who may have been back-projecting his own Jacobean preoccupations, Sidney had feared that the political consequence of the French marriage would ...”

“... Sam Wanamaker’s replica of the Globe Theatre on the South Bank. As Schwartz concludes, we may profess to admire the unique, but our first response is usually to try to reproduce it. Why? Identical twins offer an initial clue. Their doubleness sets an ideal of warm mutual sympathy against the icy individualism urged on us by contemporary economics and ...”

“... causal truths, it is supposed to follow that ‘If p then r’ is also a causal truth. This may not seem counterintuitive if one mentions only three propositions, but the extension of the transitivity over even a century, let alone the billions of years that have elapsed since the universe came into existence, if it had a beginning, has strange ...”