“... blood is sold and when it is donated. Edward Bristow’s subject, likewise, is a service which may be either donated or traded – or obtained under duress. His exploration of it takes him into unfamiliar recesses of public and private depravity, and shines a torch into the laundry room of Judaism. This is to take white slavery as seriously as it was taken ...”

“... Government was subsidising members of the Jacobin Club who advocated extremist policies. They may, of course, have been genuine radicals, or careerists who had put their money – or rather Pitt’s – on extremism and were grateful to be paid for what they would have done in any case. Whoever they were, they do not seem to have made much ...”

“... a ‘catastrophe’? On the other hand, a situation of relative land plenty and labour shortage may have led to a renewed emphasis on slavery. This may explain why the seventh and eighth-century wars in which so many Anglo-Saxon kings lost their lives bear many of the characteristics of slave hunts. They were also, of ...”

“... wag. Everybody seems to be convinced that he is saying something. But brave though his confidence may be it is also one of the more worrying symptoms of a bizarre and poignant neurological disorder. John suffers from dysphasia – or aphasia as it is also called; and it is one of the many paradoxes of his condition that although he can hear perfectly, he ...”

“... powerful ignoramus as opposed to the man of humble wisdom, but makes them more politely – which may explain why, despite dying at approximately the same age as Socrates, he died of natural causes and not the overpowering soporific effects of a hemlock cocktail mixed at state expense. It is interesting that we know of the thought of three of the world’s ...”

“... lefthandedly by authors who save their best efforts for quite different sorts of writing. They may, as Jonathan Raban’s title suggests, be working for love as well as money, and it is easy to understand their wish to give their best work in this kind a more permanent form. Raban has some engaging remarks on this subject. As he says, very few people can ...”

“... as for many upper-class Indians under British rule, if not accompanied by equality of opportunity, may foster a hostile nationalism. Anderson is sometimes led away by trivia, or by the desire to present a paradox. ‘There has not been an English dynasty ruling in London since the 11th century,’ he states: yet if we are to accept that migration to the United ...”

“... are alien, has left a vast interpenetration largely unexamined. Indeed, all the sins of omission may point to inadmissible ties. Not that Declan Kiberd, director of the Yeats Summer School, would admit them. Citing the ideas of Edward Said, he recently argued that ‘ “Irishness” is simply the experience of being endlessly defined and described, derided ...”

“... and the quasi-religious cults of personality which drive popular music marketing, are artists who may never ‘perform’ in public, may make music under a plethora of different names, and distribute their work through an underground network of DJs and specialist record shops. At the receiving end, the listeners and dancers ...”

“... as ever. Never has philosophy been so fast, so neat.’ In view of all these successes it may be surprising to find that Ayer habitually thought of himself as an ‘outsider’ and ‘self-made’, exaggerating the poverty of his family, looking at the world, as his widow, Dee Wells, puts it, with ‘big desiring eyes’, and, despite a career of ...”

“... be relevant. If the brain does different tasks at different places, that rather suggests that it may do them in different ways. Whereas, if anything that the brain can do it can do just about anywhere, that rather suggests that different kinds of thinking may recruit quite similar neural mechanisms. So empiricists, since ...”

“... Macmillan found him a crashing bore and his politics were similarly far from exciting. Yet he may have been more important than posterity has allowed. R.J.Q. Adams makes that case quietly but firmly. He was, on the face of it, an unusual choice for Party leader. To begin with, he was middle-class, a businessman with interests in metal and banking, when ...”

“... the task of explaining why we are wrong to underestimate the power of British rain: why, though it may never inspire the immediate awe of a hurricane or a tornado or a Russian purga, it is worthy of respect and fear; and how, even as the mysterious forces of cultural evolution lead more urban Britons to wander about without umbrellas and rainwear, hoping that ...”

“... The publication of pictures showing what may happen to Iraqi prisoners at the hands of their captors allowed the outside world to see what Iraqis had known for some time: the occupation is very brutal. In Baghdad, stories had been circulating for months about systematic torture in the prisons. In the US the impact of the photographs was all the greater thanks to the administration’s previous success in controlling news from Iraq ...”

“... The natural inference is that there were two communities, each with its own burial ground; there may well have been others nearby, in places where the conditions of the modern city make systematic exploration impossible – on the Quirinal, for instance. The Sacra Via cemetery was closed in the archaeological phase known as Cultura laziale IIA1, in either ...”