“... by the litigants, who will be appearing before them. Recusal in such states is going to require more than the occasional dollar in the judicial collecting tin.* Would it matter if the same judge had in other cases found against the company that had sponsored his campaign? The risk of bias is not limited to favouritism. There is an equal and opposite risk ...”

“... it was as though my schoolfellows and I had stumbled into the pages of ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ or another of the horrid inventions in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Led past stacks of disintegrating coffins, from which skulls and yellowing bones spilled across the dusty floor, we were introduced to the crypt’s ...”

“... a week for 25 years, until only days before his death. He was aware that the less he said the more was said about him (‘It is his fault if we stare,’ H.W. Garrod said testily in an Oxford lecture on Housman in 1929), and the life was measured out in anecdotes, captured in memoirs, diaries and letters, preserved in the aspic of college rumour, handed ...”

“... its author died, and is 97 now. Still the books keep coming. This latest pair, by Barry Gewen and Thomas Schwartz, have moved beyond outrage to something more like bafflement, tinged with affection. Each begins with an effective admission of authorial uncertainty: why, they ask, am I writing about Henry Kissinger, when so ...”

“... was long-lasting and apparently complete. Whether the main body of the Parliamentary cause was more successful, or whether the heirs of Pym and Hampden were equally defeated, is a different question, and one to be discussed later. Those Mr Hill recognises as defeated produced a multiplicity of explanations of their failure. Among all the explanations, two ...”

“... Syphilis and the League of Nations have more in common than you might think. Both were dumped into the dustbin of history in the 1940s: syphilis by penicillin, the League of Nations by the Second World War. But the connection goes further than chronological coincidence. Before the war, the League took a deep and direct interest in syphilis, with its Health Organisation arranging conferences on the laboratory diagnosis of the disease ...”

“... All literary works are anonymous, but some are more anonymous than others. It is in the nature of a piece of writing that it is able to stand free of its begetter, and can dispense with his or her physical presence. In this sense, writing is more like an adolescent than a toddler ...”

“... 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 ...”