“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and Penthouse, with a script by Gore Vidal. It starred Malcolm McDowell as a convincingly bonkers young emperor, backed up by a group of A-list actors, including Gielgud and Helen Mirren, who were said to have been unaware of the soft porn enterprise in which they were involved. (Did they think that Guccione was bankrolling serious historical drama?) Much ...”

“... own way and saw no reason not to have it in matters of state as well as at home. All in all the young queen had more in common with her unpopular and self-indulgent uncles George IV and William IV than the fresh-faced appearance and the famous promise to ‘be good’ suggested. Courtiers and Victoria herself recorded tearful scenes and door slamming on her ...”

“... of other names in Montpellier and Périgueux. He was in a three-person cell that included a Jew, Robert Kirschen. In 1942, the Gestapo pounced on a Resistance network at the Maison de Chimie, and Kirschen’s younger brother André was among those arrested. André, at 15 the youngest of them, was the only one not shot, but in ‘compensation’, both his ...”

“... attitudes, are fairly hysterical. The professional shark-hater and shark-killer Captain William E. Young remarked in his 1934 memoir Shark! Shark! that the very word summons up a powerful mental image of a cold-blooded rover of the deep, its huge mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth, swimming ceaselessly night and day in search of anything that might fall into ...”

“... at Owen’s College in Manchester, ‘what kinds of habits &c I had to overcome when I was young & thinking of speaking to others.’ But he took pains to learn, and to fashion a suitable character for his performances. Dignified, unostentatious, unforced, he became the handsome, masculine face of Victorian public science, a gentleman who could command ...”

“... A senior official told Scahill that Obama was ‘surprised and upset and wanted an explanation’. Robert Gibbs, a senior advisor to Obama, suggested that the boy wouldn’t have been killed if he’d had a ‘more responsible father’. A wrongful death suit against US officials for the death of both al-Awlakis and a third US citizen is pending. Scahill ...”

“... of Kennedy’s best and brightest, which was meant to balance out the number-crunching prowess of Robert McNamara and the Whiz Kids. In his dozens of books of American history – several of which remain indispensable – Schlesinger was among the chief assemblers of the King James Version of American liberalism. His Cold War manual, The Vital Center, is one ...”

“... library. Convalescence was transformed by a gift from his cousin, a copy of The Suicide Club by Robert Louis Stevenson.These glimpses were a romance of the road. Adolfo was feeding me titbits from twice translated interviews. But his portrait of Vaes, so decisively sketched, fired my selective misreading. The fiction of our weary march is that ...”

“... immortals. The increasing datedness of the autodidact canon could itself become a handicap: the young V.S. Pritchett (though hardly working class in origin) dreamed of entering literary bohemia in the late 1910s, but ‘all my tastes were conventionally Victorian . . . I seemed irredeemably backward and lower class and the cry of the autodidact and snob ...”

“... of this kind was the conviction that Pound had undergone a fundamental change of heart in Pisa. Robert Fitzgerald, reviewing the Pisan Cantos in the New Republic in August 1948, was glad to find the poet ‘for the first time expressing a personal desolation and a kind of repentance’. The trick was to imagine a desolation so extreme that, whatever Pound ...”

“... that William Wordsworth thought fit to give the Great God Pan. And then he crossed over to the young United States: I mean Pan did. Suddenly he gets a new name. He becomes the Oversoul, the Aliness of everything. To this new Lucifer Gray of a Pan Whitman sings the famous ‘Song of Myself’: ‘I am All, and All is Me.’ That is: ‘I am Pan, and Pan is ...”

“... For​ the late French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Thomas Robert Malthus was an indispensable guide to the agrarian past. Le Roy Ladurie applied Malthus’s argument that population grows faster than subsistence to the archives of Languedoc, where, in the empirical detail of parish registers, cadastral surveys, tax rolls and price series, he perceived ‘the immense respiration of a social structure’ over the course of three centuries ...”