“... family home. Inglis, in fact, hazards a guess that R.G. was the inspiration for the elder brother, John Walker, in Ransome’s We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea. True or not, it reminds us that when Collingwood set out, single-handed, on his ill-fated voyage into the English Channel in 1938, he had a lifetime of risky sailing experiences behind him. Inglis is ...”

“... The only public figure to denounce capitalism in the past 25 years, Hobsbawm claims, was Pope John Paul II. All the same, another couple of decades later, the fainthearted witnessed a system so exultant and impregnable that it only just managed to keep the cash machines open on the high streets. Eric Hobsbawm, who was born in the year of the Bolshevik ...”

“... were few. Palaeontologists and geologists now generally agree that the Earth has endured five major extinctions, and more than a dozen lesser ones. The first took place 450 million years ago, during the late Ordovician period, and the most lethal 200 million years later, during the Permian-Triassic – ‘the great dying’, when nine out of ten marine ...”

“... him in the 1750s. So too, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, agnostic clerics such as John Robinson, the author of Honest to God, David Jenkins, the controversial bishop of Durham, the Scots Episcopalian bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, and the Anglican atheist Don Cupitt belong more convincingly in liberal ranks than with authentic enemies ...”

“... turned up in 1974, and kept Christopher both amused and busy translating his poetry into English. John Silber, who later became a reactionary megalomaniac (first as president of Boston University and then as failed gubernatorial candidate), was at that point a brilliant and progressive dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, also brought in by Ransom. The ...”

“... striking departure from conventional fiction writing is Quin’s use of quotation, which becomes a major, if invisible strand in Tripticks but appears first in Three when S writes, ‘All afternoon surrounded, exchanging newspapers. I came across the following …’ and follows it with two pages of almost verbatim quotation from a 1966 article about the ...”

“... I recently discovered that Aigas House is now home to the nature writer and rewilding advocate Sir John Lister-Kaye, who has restored the building to its Scots baronial glory. Aigas is now a field centre, an ecotourism business and the site of two experimental programmes: a Beaver Demonstration Project and a captive Wildcat Conservation Breeding ...”

“... Meanwhile, plenty of other countries might also have been classed as ‘pandemoniums’, to use John Milton’s newly minted word. France endured regicide and rebellion and the Holy Roman Empire lost perhaps five million lives to the Thirty Years’ War. Nothing in England was comparable to the sack of Magdeburg in 1631. Jackson anticipates and deflects ...”

“... of a scruple that finds its red line somewhere between marriage and the marriage bed. (Yes, John Ruskin, but this, we’re given to understand, was Vollman’s second wife.) What’s really odd is Vollman’s need to explain a 19th-century wedding in terms meant to flatter a 21st-century sensibility. When Vollman says: ‘I know what you are ...”

“... fact: the mind prefers narratives to numbers.Kahneman and Tversky’s research began to have a major impact outside psychology after the publication in 1979 of their work on ‘prospect theory’. There they argued that people were more concerned with change than with current states – with gaining and losing money rather than having a particular level of ...”

“... state created by the New Deal to the stripped-down neoliberal state of our own time. And a major advance in public health was accomplished through the mobilisation of a parsimonious social vision. This wasn’t just a tale of heroes and villains.It’s hard to lament the demise of the smoky world of the mid-20th century. The anti-smoking crusade of the ...”

“... The Ancient Paths was not so revolutionary. It belongs squarely to a tradition dating back to John Toland’s History of the Druids. Toland, who seems to have invented the term ‘pantheism’, believed he had uncovered ‘the philosophy of the Druids concerning the Gods, human souls, Nature in general and in particular the Heavenly Bodies’, but died ...”

“... about their popularity with paedophiles, and their central role in paedophile activity, this is a major distortion, especially in Dr Li’s explorations of the subjective worlds of his 20 abusers. The clear implication of Tim Tate’s book would be, indeed, either that some of Dr Li’s subjects were less than truthful about their dependence on child ...”

“... at Manderley whom she also called Robert. The fortunes of Moper, who at this stage had risen to be Major-General Sir Frederick Browning, in fact provide some of the most interesting parts of the book. (He had other nicknames, acquired before his marriage, but they were neither strained nor foolish: one was Boy, to distinguish him from his father who was also a ...”

“... A subtler, and more economical, exercise in revisionism was performed by the Melbourne historian John Hirst in Convict Society and its Enemies (1983). Hirst studied the early history of New South Wales, intent on understanding how a penal colony had changed into a free society. As he stripped away the anti-transportation campaigners’ caricatures and ...”