“... Cambridge. Out of favour and of office in the years from 1604, the period dominated by his enemy Robert Cecil, Greville thought to occupy his leisure with a history of the Tudors, only to be thwarted by Cecil’s refusal to allow him access to the state papers. Cecil’s response is understandable, for historical scholarship – like historical drama, which ...”

“... as we shall see, would be to endorse the view that Scepticism is true and to invite the charge of self-refutation. Sextus thinks of his Outlines as a ‘narrative’, not as a demonstration, of Pyrrhonism. The Sceptic, he writes in a famous passage, is like the painter Apelles. Frustrated at his failure to depict the foaming mouth of a horse, Apelles flung ...”

“... conservative Midwestern town, but there is no follow-up on this broad hint. The youngest brother, Robert, stayed in Ohio. James described him as a ‘Babbitt’ – a smug materialist. He too was a published author, though his book was called The Successful High School Athletic Programme. Purdy remarked that if Robert or ...”

“... the most important thing. In a presidential address to the American Economic Association in 2003, Robert Lucas, Nobel prizewinner and one of the most prominent macroeconomists in the world, put it plainly: Macroeconomics was born as a distinct field in the 1940s, as a part of the intellectual response to the Great Depression. The term then referred to the ...”

“... Wilde’s second son – that kindled his interest. One of his first truly Cravanesque pieces, self-published in 1913, is a strange séance-like ‘interview’ with the long-dead Wilde, whom he also calls Sebastian after Wilde’s Parisian alias, Sebastian Melmoth. The piece veers between adulation and insult; Cravan is seduced by the possibility that he ...”

“... Rap Guide to Evolution, featuring the ‘African-American Atheist Rapper Greydon Square’, the ‘self-styled “Walking Stephen Hawking”’. In Manhattan, the Ensemble Theater produced Darwin’s Challenge (‘On his trip aboard the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin wanders into a cave on Galapagos and finds himself on the set of a 21st-century reality TV show ...”

“... at the hospital that morning looking even after weeks of illness not much different from her usual self; weeping and distraught, it’s true, but still plump and pretty, clutching her everlasting handbag and still somehow managing to face the world. As I followed my father down the ward I wondered why we were bothering: there was no such person here. He ...”

“... nowadays I’m not sure that ‘the pictures’, like ‘the wireless’, aren’t among the self-consciously adopted emblems of fogeydom, the verbal equivalent of those smart Covent Garden establishments that do a line in old luggage. But calling the pictures ‘the movies’ went with calling cigarettes ‘fags’, beer ‘booze’ or girls ...”

“... fighting to the last bullet to defend Hitler in his bunker, could emerge as best choice for the Robert Schuman Prize for services to European unity.* Why should European justice too not let bygones be bygones? More generally, appointments to the court had little or nothing to do with juridical qualifications. Nearly all were political. The Belgian judge was ...”

“... stopped-up bowels, Jewish angst and mother-woe, revived and inflamed accusations that Roth was a self-hating Jew, an enemy of his own people peddling filth. ‘Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew! It is coming out of my ears already, the saga of the suffering Jews! Do me a favour, my people, and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass – I happen also to be ...”

“... Merchants and Revolution, dedicated to Stone, comprehensively overturns that judgment. Its author, Robert Brenner, belongs to that rare group of historians who have given their name to a whole literature – the ‘Brenner Debate’ on the origins of agrarian capitalism in Europe recalling the ‘Pirenne Thesis’ of old. His new book, in which the name of ...”

“... her Catriona; would that be all right by me? I was very happy about it. We were both admirers of Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped was really our favourite, but we couldn’t call our daughter David, or name her after Alan Breck. She’d have to be named for the sequel.Like all my contemporaries, in those first years when the contraceptive pill was widely ...”

“... the uncertain Irishness of certain writers. Was Sterne Irish? Was Oliver Goldsmith Irish? Was Robert Tressell Irish? Is Iris Murdoch Irish? But the argument about who was gay and who was not and how we know is more difficult. How can someone be gay if, as in the case of Gogol, there is no direct evidence? Yet if you trawl through Gogol’s stories with ...”

“... scientist, intrigued by the general’s stake in his own myth-making as a means of empowerment and self-justification. In his new biography, Jonathan Fenby delivers the infant Charles into an era of anxiety, brought on by the growing strength of Germany and the sense that France had lost its way. The year was 1890; the smart of the Franco-Prussian War was ...”

“... sculpted my life like a statue made of matter that’s foreign to my being. Having employed my self-awareness in such a purely artistic way, and having become so completely external to myself, I sometimes no longer recognise myself. Who am I behind this unreality? I don’t know. I must be someone.’In 1907, aged nineteen, Pessoa wrote some brief ...”