“... material for biographers and Patton has had a dozen already, to say nothing of a film that brought Richard Nixon great consolation during the lonely watches of the Watergate nights. Only Erwin Rommel can match Patton in the publicity stakes, and he was a very much duller man. For the British, Patton may have been a minor if ...”

“... Coward (1992) will have gathered what close friendship sometimes, though not always, meant. They may be more shocked to learn from Hoare (quoting Robin Maugham) that in youth Coward was a gifted and audacious shoplifter (‘a daredevil game many adolescents play’). Hoare tells us that in the spring of 1918 the precocious Coward, 18 years old, received a ...”

“... the infallible bisection of his hair. As soon as the trial got under way at the Old Bailey in May 1918, Billing attracted the support of the Christian Scientists, who believed him to be ‘the Saviour, Christ the King, come to redeem them in this moment of national peril’. Concerned that he would not be able to continue his work if imprisoned, ‘a ...”

“... through the war, though they were rather eclipsed in 1916 by John Buchan’s Greenmantle, in which Richard Hannay bluffed his way to Constantinople to prevent a wild Islamic prophet, backed by Germany, from setting the East in flames. In the real world the Germans were backing a more potent troublemaker by smuggling Lenin to St Petersburg, thus establishing ...”

“... style would for once be wholly appropriate? Why academic presses rather than HarperCollins? This may be mere circumstance. Perhaps film rights are even now being auctioned. But I suspect not. Corbin’s work is not packaged for bookclubs or bestseller lists. He does not present picaresque narratives, inspiring characters or improving parables, but rather ...”

“... Paine published The Age of Reason, ‘probably’, thinks Hitchens, in reaction to a sermon by Richard Watson, the bishop of Llandaff, though, as Paine himself tells us, he had not heard of the sermon until it was advertised in Watson’s reply to The Age of Reason, An Apology for the Bible. This is only a selection of the many errors in this book, and ...”

“... representative of the period. Writers did not always regard him as a benevolent force. The poet Richard Bruce Nugent described Locke as ‘a pompous, dictatorial (though learned and knowledgable) little man directing how things should go and who should be publicised as important members of this (his) select group’.In a review of Marcy Knopf’s The ...”

“... which this contrast emerges is one of this collection’s main achievements. Modern Scepticism may in fact be descended from Arcesilaus, Carneades, Aenisedemus and Sextus. But we shall see that the ancients would almost certainly not have recognised it as their legitimate heir. The opponents of ancient Scepticism, the ‘Dogmatists’, were those who ...”

“... at answers; philosphers after my heart will rather wish to convey the thought that while there may be no satisfying answers to such questions in certain forms, there are, so to speak, directions to answers, ways to think, that are worth the time of your life to discover.’ This characterisation of philosophy should not appear as alien as it is sometimes ...”

“... period of primitive agriculture, according to modern anthropology. Thus, one person’s golden age may well be another’s stone age. The last golden age of criticism was probably in 18th-century Europe, and was called the ‘age of reason’ and ‘the Enlightenment’ by its enthusiasts, the ‘age of brass’ by its contemporary detractors, and the ‘age ...”

“... published work seems to me somewhat like deserting one’s colours,’ he told Lord Lytton. ‘One may or may not repent having enlisted, but to lay down one’s arms, except under compulsion, remains intolerable.’ Politically, Swinburne saw himself as an apostle of liberalism, supporting ...”

“... a chilly forehead and a warm thigh, or St Simeon, being written by the tip of his stylus? You may prefer Marguerite Porete, burning alive with her book, or the rich black intersection of St John of the Cross or the pyroclastic whisper of Anonymous, Unknown Author. Or something a little closer to home – Jeannie, for instance, the family friend whom my ...”

“... zookeeper. Aspinall’s notoriously lethal zoos have done their bit for the scheme, but the latter may not be achievable within liberalism as we know it. This turn, unlikely as it is to land Gray a job with the Bush Administration, at least rebuts the charge of time-serving. In any case, he has been sufficiently wayward, and rude about other theorists, to ...”

“... was America. ‘It’s true there are some misguided boys,’ the principal said, ‘and they may be the ones threatening us, but it is America that has bombed their homes.’ The list of grievances against America is long: Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, the civilian death toll in Iraq, Afghanistan and increasingly in Pakistan itself. I am writing this in ...”

“... cakes (and not above stealing and swindling to buy them), not academically gifted. Baker thinks he may have been dyslexic, and he was certainly an abnormally bad speller all his life; but he read voraciously, mostly adventure stories, and seems to have enjoyed a rich fantasy life. An unhappy school career, punctuated by expulsion from Dulwich College, ended ...”