“... 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 ...”

“... students and workers) with the radical Left among the rank-and-file of the Communist Party. This may pose a threat to the Party leadership: although the Young Turks who organise the Front in Moscow, such as Boris Kagarlitsky, have argued that ‘conditions are not yet ready to replace the one-party system with a multi-party one,’ it is implicit in their ...”

“... posters or School Prints, work by Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Paul Nash. As early as May 1930, another editor, Betjeman’s mentor Philip Morton Shand, part of whose enviable brief was to travel Europe in search of articles to translate and buildings to publish, but who also pursued his own parallel interests in wine and food, ...”

“... whether by intuition or ratiocination, to writers of detective stories. That a cultural assumption may lead to false interpretation of clues is a donnée of all those crime stories in which a nursery rhyme seems to provide a key to a sequence of murders – Ten Little Indians, for instance. And of course the work of the detective often consists in ...”

“... a not-too-oblique attack on Irish neutrality in the course of a visit to Northern Ireland on 4 May, he was – presumably – unaware of the fact that he was reopening a book which both Churchill and de Valera had decided peaceably to close almost exactly thirty years ago. That at any rate would be the charitable explanation. Within hours of his ...”