“... is the appearance hereabouts of some parting advice one mother gave to her son, the young Scottish MP James Fergusson, as he set out for Westminster: ‘Never expose yourself, James, to be tried for a rape, for your broad shoulders will cause a jury to think it probable you made the attempt, and your face will make it manifest that it must have ...”

“... their engagement rings like one-bead rosaries’. Or again, in contrasting the styles in which young middle-class and working-class women walk, he says of the latter that they ‘tend to walk from the knees, trottily’. The observation may not allow enough for changing styles of skirts and shoes, but ‘trottily’ is perfect. His prose is marbled with ...”

“... in the midst of self-defence, in gentle submission’. The advice of The Mother’s Assistant and Young Lady’s Friend was ‘Always conciliate,’ and The Lady’s Amaranth stated that a woman governs by ‘persuasion ... The empire of woman is an empire of softness ... her commands are caresses.’ As with Ambrose Heath’s idea of turnips (‘harshness ...”

“... of blacks ever made by Europeans. One of these is Reynolds’s incomplete and undated study of a young black man listening (it seems) to the winds that disturb the sky behind him, a painting long believed to be a portrait of Dr Johnson’s beloved black servant, Frank Barber. Houdon’s radiant patinated plaster head of a black woman of 1781, probably made ...”

“... parts don’t sound very disconsolate. A large number were addressed to Elizabeth Cameron, the young and beautiful wife of a Pennsylvania Senator. He had begun to write to her effusively, almost flirtatiously, in 1886 while travelling in Japan. Several years later he was patently love-sick. The long and detailed letters he sent her – a travel ...”

“... well above the knee’. That, too, is familiar. In They Came like Swallows, the older boy, Robert, is a natural athlete, but one of his legs has been amputated and he wears a false limb. And in So Long, See You Tomorrow, the narrator describes how, when his brother undressed at night, ‘he left his artificial leg leaning against a chair.’ In that ...”

“... of you has any idea how difficult it is for a Christian to write fiction in Japan,’ the young Suguro reflects, when colleagues criticise the intellectual artifice of his writing. And now for more than thirty years he has been publishing novels distinguished for the power of their Christian apologetic, particularly in their presentation of the ...”

“... King was relevant to the killings in Vietnam. (I don’t know whether, or how, the shooting of Robert Kennedy was relevant: it may have been done by the Mafia.) In West Germany, that April, a student protester was shot, as a scapegoat: a dissident from East Germany, with Protestant Christian beliefs, Rudi Dutschke survived the attack for 11 ...”

“... it got just 28 per cent. But even in 1987, with party political videos to remind the nation that Young Upwardly-Mobile Kinnocks – ‘Yuk-kies’, Jenkins can’t resist suggesting – had displaced the wild-eyed patricians, it got only 32. Neil Kinnock had said that to ‘lose badly’ was to come in with less than 250 seats. The Party won just 229. The ...”

“... powerful. Locke passed his intellectual curiosity about the powers of enthusiasm to his pupil, the young Anthony Ashley Cooper, who was to become 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury had Locke as his private tutor for the early years of his education and was to call him his ‘foster-father’. Locke had been at the right hand of his grandfather, the 1st Earl ...”

“... her husband faced prolonged imprisonment, Adams’s wife committed suicide, leaving him with three young daughters to raise. Since the right of habeas corpus does not exist in Switzerland, Adams was held for three months before trial and was not even allowed to attend his wife’s funeral. Though subsequently convicted and ordered to pay costs, he received a ...”

“... chapter, ‘Going down fighting’. This ‘life and times’ examines Scargill’s personal rise: Young Communist militant; Area Council delegate at the age of 26; compensation agent in 1972 at the age of 34, having just attained national prominence in the ‘battle of Saltley gates’; Yorkshire president a year later; national president in ...”

“... style in comparable passages. Raban weaves in phrases from other Americans as well: Henry James, Robert Lowell, further bits from T. S. Eliot. At the end of his penultimate chapter Raban prints the note he received from Boom-Boom Kelley when he and his boat detached themselves from Kelley’s tow. ‘It was the one certificate which I had most wanted to ...”

“... a tension. This appeal to unanalysed pre-propositional intuition flies in the face of everything young analytic philosophers are taught in school. When it comes to offering an explanation, Nozick answers the question ‘What is it about (some of) our decisions, what feature do they have, that lifts them above the nexus of causal determination?’ by saying ...”

“... philosophy. But Kant himself had written a less purely critical third Critique. In this, as Robert Solomon describes it in an accessible and entertaining new study of Hegel’s Phenomenology, Kant had returned to nature ‘not as the phenomenal world of the understanding and the causal laws of Newton’s physics, but as the “supersensible” universe ...”