“... of the West in antiquity, was given flesh and blood by the Medieval Church, and was then redefined more starkly by Descartes and Newton. It became the leitmotiv of many great scientists such as Faraday and Helmholtz – not to mention a host of lesser figures such as Hans Christian Oersted, whose work is celebrated in one of these essays. Unification is the ...”

“... de Urbina. ‘This catafalque had a width of eighteen feet and a height of fifty-four feet [with] more than two thousand candles, which gave out a brilliant radiance. The catafalque had four steps going up to the tomb, covered with yellow brocade, and at their top was the high tomb, covered with a very rich brocade cloth.’ The queen’s chaplain, Tomás ...”

“... years of the 20th century was to deny or dissolve the problem: if we just talked about everything more clearly, Wittgenstein and Ryle believed, we’d see there was no issue. That moment having finally passed, say forty years ago, philosophy took the problem of consciousness as one of the three major challenges faced by anyone attempting a theory of the ...”

“... to an asylum. Far from getting better, her health worsened as she got older, her stays becoming more frequent and longer in duration: Lamb was left alone for months in 1827, 1829, 1830, 1832 and 1833. Each time it was possible that she would not recover.Both siblings suffered from depression. Mary reported them ‘looking at each other with long and rueful ...”

“... of the worst thing you could do’. And here is Hardwick at the public library discovering Thomas Mann, whose Death in Venice has been mis-shelved in the murder mystery section. (A lesser woman would have put it back.) In 1934, she went to the University of Kentucky, where she sought out ‘the literary people and the political people’. ‘I have a ...”

“... wary of Festschrifts, which are liable to interest the recipient’s friends and colleagues more than a wider audience; but this is not an ordinary Festschrift. There are no hushed tributes, no rehearsals for obituary notices. By the time he gets a Festschrift, a historian’s ideas are often seen as the product of a generation that has had its day. No ...”

“... responsible, practical mother. The full explanation has to take all these factors into account and more. But the irrational compulsion to end it makes me think that the body was governing the mind. The rehearsal of all this is painful. Anne Stevenson, against the odds, has written a decent and intelligent book. It is certainly the best book on Sylvia Plath so ...”

“... like dissent between taxi-drivers. They were disappointed. Taylor stayed out of the mud. More accurately, he wrote in these pages that he found the whole affair boring – ‘cold mutton’, as he said about the Anthony Blunt affair. Perhaps he did. Historians are queer. Still, boredom is ruder than execration. I have nearly finished imitating ...”

“... and since Orestes at last escapes maternal retribution, Janet Hobhouse’s Helen is arguably the more tragic character of the two. Yet the saddest page of the book comes before the story: ‘Hobhouse, Janet, 1948-91 ... Copyright 1993 by the Estate of Janet Hobhouse’. I had met (I cannot say ‘I knew’) Janet Hobhouse in her youth, when I was a graduate ...”

“... Napoleon sold his Louisiana holdings to the United States in 1803, the entire executive branch of Thomas Jefferson’s government consisted of 132 non-military employees. Jefferson’s own staff comprised one person, his secretary. The staff of the State Department, headed by James Madison, consisted of one chief clerk, seven subordinate clerks and a ...”

“... In the event the army bore the brunt of his economies. Monitoring maharajas therefore became even more important, and looking after the wealthiest ones imperative. Two of the ripest pickings were the kingdom of Awadh – modern-day Uttar Pradesh, then the granary of India – and Hyderabad, with its rich cotton fields. The trick, as Low learned, was to get ...”

“... might not mind keeping up a small annual pension to a widow in Shropshire; parishes that were more pressed – like St George the Martyr in Southwark, which included several debtors’ prisons with their collateral burdens of wives and children lodging nearby – had to weigh up their choices: they could give casual relief, or insist that claimants return ...”

“... party’s triumph. Ahern, they said, was a ‘political tsunami’, and Cowen, if anything, even more formidable. This time around, neither Ahern nor Cowen was standing, rightly fearing the vengeance of the electorate. Cowen’s awe-inspiring competence now seems a quaint legend of the barely remembered past, as difficult to credit as the notion that Irish ...”

“... and gives the novel a starred review, praising its ‘charming’ recombination of the styles of Thomas Pynchon and Boris Vian and its ‘tender’, ‘childlike’ depiction of heterosexual love. Jack figures the Kirkus reviewer must be a woman, probably studying French, unduly influenced by Will’s touched-up author photo. Then comes a review in the New ...”

“... there are no other indications that the road might be dangerous. In the last nine months, however, more American soldiers have been killed here – or just off the highway, in the dishevelled truck-stop towns of Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, Kaldiyah and Ramadi – than in any other part of Iraq. Earlier this year, the US military command claimed the number of attacks ...”