“... assumptions’, ‘more or less imbued’: whatever the actual history, these phrases bear the mark of very recent times; all were written, in fact, within the last twenty years. The tide of metaphysical and idealist speculation in the humanities is not yet at flood. Within a period of persistent political reaction, and of more specific kinds of political ...”

“... Government, who had contracted the project to Boeing, eventually cancelled the SST as its costs rose, and with most countries still refusing to allow supersonic passenger flights over their territory, the Boeing 747 remains in 1993 the fastest and most cost-effective long-haul airliner. Pan-Am, meanwhile, went bust in 1991 – not least, Irving ...”

“... that matter?), Margaret (of Anjou) as Margareth, and so on. To be translated more than once is the mark of a classic, and automatically makes one wonder how this one is faring after 78 years. How enduring the appeal of its subject-matter remains can be gauged from the chapter-titles: ‘The Passionate Intensity of Life’ (an echo of Yeats, replacing ...”

“... gay sex, out of sight of the law. The association with licence has never quite gone away. In 1963, Mark Birley insisted that his new club, Annabel’s, ‘must smell of exclusivity and sex’. Paula Yates posed naked in the saloon of the Reform Club.The 18th-century business model was to fleece rich young men by overcharging for food and drink. The idea of the ...”

“... hate like brothers’ hate.’ We had heard of Cain and Abel, the first pair of brothers. ‘Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.’ We knew about Jacob and Esau too, and thought Esau entirely in the right. ‘And Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing wherewith his father blessed him.’ These were not encouraging precedents. Despite such ...”

“... At first no bodies are found, so the people are simply missing. Giono uses careful language to mark this mystery (‘must have gone’, ‘disappeared from the face of the earth’) as if it were impolitic to assume or speak of direct violence. Then the bodies are discovered hanging in a tree, and the killer, a certain Monsieur V., is tracked down. The ...”

“... Laughland, Ponting’s lawyer. By not doing this, Michael Heseltine has earned himself a black mark in important Conservative circles, where, when it comes to the leadership stakes, it will be taken into account that he did not behave as an officer and a gentleman should by going along to the Old Bailey to face the music. This is a view I have heard from ...”

“... is never quite the same. But I always include two staples: fibrous material like wood chippings or rose prunings to create tiny air pockets. Then water. After that, it just takes time. There’s a eucharistic mystery to the biochemical transformations that follow. Things fall apart. They decompose and recompose. Thermophilic microbes foment anarchy in the ...”

“... affects this phrase: ‘he could no more be aggressive on the score of his Englishness than a rose can be aggressive on the score of his rosiness.’ So reads the American edition. The English edition of 1924 prints ‘its rosiness’, and so does Cambridge. Now, in his introduction Bruce Steele argues that Lawrence had nothing to do with the setting of ...”

“... cantantes of Madrid. Accordingly, cante jondo became more ‘civilised’, whereupon the purists rose up, protesting against its civilisation. The battle has continued unabated ever since. A high point was the Twenties, when Iberian intellectuals were gripped by españolismo, the artistic nationalism that accompanied Spain’s late entry into European ...”

“... a contrast between the prosperity of the two countries. The graph of their own standard of living rose steadily. Migrants poured in; officials in Canberra spoke seriously of the possibility of a population of 60 million by the end of the century; pasture improvement, through the use of superphosphates, generously subsidised, seemed a magical way of turning ...”

“... 1905 as one of the instigators of the Hungarian intellectual revival, he had gone on to make his mark in Germany as a cultural theorist in the tradition of Dilthey, Simmel and Weber. When he settled in Heidelberg in 1912, he seemed set for a distinguished university career. His early inquiries had focused on the relationship between spiritual experience and ...”

“... have killed him but for his mother’s self-sacrificial intervention; the scar functions, like the mark of Cain, to set Harry apart. (The evil upper-form boy Malfoy calls him ‘Scarhead’.)The Family Romance haunts the story of the ugly duckling, raised among scornful ducks until he discovers that he’s really a swan. It haunts real-life ...”

“... lesser outbreaks battered London for the next eight years. Whenever deaths from plague in London rose above 30 a week – the number was later raised to 40 – the theatres were ordered shut, with the result (as Leeds Barroll showed in his groundbreaking Politics, Plague and Shakespeare’s Theatre) that from 1603 to 1610 public playhouses were probably ...”

“... Bataille was often, as Breton remarked, an ‘excrement philosopher’.In Why Surrealism Matters, Mark Polizzotti, a biographer of Breton and translator of many Surrealist texts, makes a good case for the varied influence of the movement, especially regarding sexual politics and anticolonial struggles. He also points to its many complicities. While communists ...”