“... for British history in the Guardian a few weeks later, Schama described the story of Henry II and Thomas Becket as ‘riveting’ and ‘thrilling’, and wondered why the execution of Charles I and the rule of Oliver Cromwell, ‘this most thrilling, terrifying epic moment in British history seldom gets classroom time.’ The first task of the curriculum, as ...”

“... it, however, the power laws show that critical systems are not like this. There are in fact many more small avalanches than large ones, so that, in the simplest case, the avalanches of each size make the same net contribution. This means that no effect is small enough to be ignored: the predictor’s nightmare. Much of Bak’s book can be seen as an extended ...”

“... and to see, as it were, like God. If one had the right method, he believed, one could achieve what Thomas Nagel has called ‘the view from nowhere’ – a place of objectivity or unqualified truth. Bordo brilliantly suggests an affinity between this illusion of Modernism, the ‘view from nowhere’, and the fantasy of Post-Modernism, which she calls ‘the ...”

“... The winter of our discontent, at the end of Davis’s speech (‘what we place in the ground is no more now a man, but a seed, which after the winter of our discontent will come forth again to meet us’), is just a phrase, a little high culture, but it has eerie undertones if you think about it. The soon-to-be Richard III had a very particular discontent in ...”

“... fantasy about slippers, stockings, camisoles and stays. Since it wasn’t unusual to have 20 or more cousins of the opposite sex, they came readily to mind when the time came for marriage. Contrived or not, this habitual endogamy was loaded with grim religious and scientific caveats. The crowded, over-upholstered Victorian domestic interior was, as Kuper ...”

“... as they were called) could boast that both sides of their family had been in India for more than a hundred years. For the Scottish Wedderburns, the Indian Civil Service had become ‘a sort of hereditary calling’ in the 19th century, replacing the hereditary calling of the previous century, which had been to fight for the Jacobites and be ...”

“... remained to be done was a series of mopping-up operations or puzzle-solving, what the historian Thomas Kuhn called ‘normal science’. By the 1950s it had become clear that the cellular organelle where proteins were manufactured was the ribosome – given its name by an American microbiologist. The ribosome was known to be an extremely complex ...”

“... historical figures recast in fiction, such as Goethe, Pastor Oberlin and Philip II, Goethe’s and Thomas Mann’s Lotte, Christa Wolf’s Kassandra, Prince Rama, Rushdie’s Gibreel Farishta, Humbert Humbert, Dorothea Brooke and Mr Causaubon, the Emperor in his non-existent new clothes and Calvino’s Non-Existent Knight. With those characters the reader ...”

“... rhetoric of what Wright calls ‘Britain’s perestroika’ began to blow away and to reveal, once more, the endemic problems of the poor fish who have to swim in this clogging Aral Sea of brick and stained concrete. Patrick Wright is a wandering, disestablished scholar whose method is to walk and talk. If the old Frankfurt School had developed a course for ...”

“... man about town. He gained a first-class degree at Birmingham in 1934 and wrote a notable thesis on Thomas Hardy, leaving the University two years later as its youngest MA. Like most of his Birmingham contemporaries, he had so far lived at home, but was not a happy member of the household. Hal was ashamed of his parents, or so they felt, and only his sister ...”

“... Adorno’s own ‘damaged life’ as he called it, they are imbued with the theoretical arguments more rigorously developed in other works, such as Dialectic of Enlightenment, Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory. Even to those familiar with these demanding studies, Adorno’s virtuosity in marshalling their arguments in the analysis of literary texts ...”

“... and intellectual Dissenters. He dislikes certain strains in Anglicanism. He states baldly that Thomas Ken’s ‘Evening Hymn’ is ‘very indifferent writing’, and he presumes that quoting the poem in its entirety will prove his point. It does not. Davie is disingenuous when he argues that because Ken’s ‘Evening Hymn’ is sung in abbreviated form ...”

“... was almost unreachable. Not that he’d written many book reviews lately. His literary papers were more a habit, his one luxury. He often told me how, in some far-flung place, wearying of the jabber of an alien culture, he would retreat to a quiet corner and ‘tune in’ to more rarefied conversation. I saw him do this ...”

“... his account of how savagely the regicides were treated by comparison with the king. For it is more than a political scientist’s conceit that the English Civil War, like the American one, is not yet over. In 1967, when the High Court for the first time asserted a measure of judicial control over the exercise by ministers of the prerogative power of the ...”

“... from bouts of fever that were almost certainly malarial. Some years after Cromwell’s death, Thomas Sydenham, the physician who first described scarlet fever, and whose description of an acute attack of gout was still being recommended to medical students 250 years later, openly advocated the use of the bark; but it was Charles II’s recurrent malaria ...”