“... opportunity to sweep away this heap of broken images and start afresh. Or rather, start once more with the good old things, moving forward to a classical, orderly, tradition-bound past in the face of that squalid cult of anarchic subjectivism, self-expressive personality, economic laissez-faire, Protestant ‘inner light’ and Bolshevik subversion which ...”

“... of scholars. Alongside works such as Sophocles’ Trackers and the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, a sensation in the early years of the collection, Oxyrhynchus has yielded a student’s whiny letter to his father, legal petitions alleging everything from high crimes to petty acts of violence and endless accounts and receipts. Papyri have played a ...”

“... the New Orthodoxy. Monetarism had overthrown discredited Keynesianism, and nowhere was its victory more warmly welcomed than at Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street. Yet today things look a little different. Despite more than six years’ declared commitment to monetary discipline (even longer if we include the half-hearted ...”

“... Thomas Hobbes, in one of the best known and most abused phrases in the English language, described the life of man in a state of nature as ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short’. Less famous, but almost as notorious, is Hobbes’s contention that the relations between the states that human beings create in order to escape the misery of their natural condition are subject to nothing but the laws that produced that misery in the first place ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... which extends down the coast, thus excluding a large part of British America from the ocean … more than doubles the United States coast on the Pacific … includes a great number of islands, and is of the highest importance as a naval depot and for strategic purposes. It is a valuable fur country, and embraces a vast section of territory, the possession ...”

“... 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 ...”