“... fallen ill, perhaps with the sweating-sickness. She recovered, but on 2 April 1502, Arthur, who may already have been suffering from tuberculosis, succumbed to the illness and died. The death of Prince Arthur provoked consternation both in London and Granada. Though England still had an heir to the throne in the ten-year-old Prince Henry, the ...”

“... quotes Mill’s wonderful remark about the ‘deep slumber of a decided opinion’, and we may well think that they also serve who only sit and sleep. For both Prendergast and Catherine Gallagher, the counterfactual is not any old fantasy but an alarm call for those who have been sleeping too long or too comfortably. There are attractions and risks in ...”

“... junior members of the Bar, ever sycophantic in their quest for advancement. Though the Telegraph may have been seeking to protect the innocence of its readers, there is nothing unusual in an ageing QC using his money and position to gain young admirers; nor about a gap between perceptions of the public and the private man. Yet, despite the excesses to which ...”

“... file, and some forty thousand of them died. Their sufferings were not mythical: nonetheless, one may question the way their particular sacrifice came to dominate the nation’s collective memory of the war (the memories of France and Germany were quite differently constituted). Still very much an insular nation, Britain could not easily comprehend the extent ...”

“... back to the essay on genres, which in turn sends us out to other poems in the anthology ... There may be other collections of poetry conceived in this way, but I have not come across them; certainly this is a model it would repay any anthologist to study. The embedding of the poetry in its historical and literary context is particularly valuable here, for the ...”

“... and dividing the weekends in London between his new and his old families. Unconventional this may have been, but as Wrigley shows, Taylor found it highly functional. Up at dawn and at the typewriter soon afterwards to tap out his thousand words a day (‘I try not to write more,’ he told Ved Mehta), he turned out a steady stream of books (including The ...”

“... She believes that Gödel’s theorems were designed to refute the formalist programme of David Hilbert, according to which mathematics is just an arbitrary human creation, ‘a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper’. Wrong, wrong, wrong! But we can see how Goldstein was misled. There is no doubt that the ...”

“... it seems positively old-boyish, to say: ‘William James must have been quite a handful.’ And it may be that James’s justification of vivisection on the grounds that ‘a heroic dog’ would gladly make the sacrifice if he understood the excellence of the cause does a little more than make ‘a modern reader . . . uncomfortable’. To me it seems ...”

“... he com furth of Ingland’. It is not known for sure what he had been doing there. He may well have been in the entourage of the Scottish embassy which was conducting the negotiations with Henry VII that led to the marriage two years later of Princess Margaret Tudor to James IV. ‘London thow art of Towynys A per se’, an anonymous poem, is said ...”

“... generally fear for his son’s stability in an adult and not comfortably Jewish world. The father may not be as crazy as he sounds; when asked to explain his anxiety, he replies: ‘It’s about life, where the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences.’ ‘Oh, Christ,’ Marcus says, ‘you sound like a fortune cookie.’ He will come to see that his ...”

“... marker-penned slogans, or doodles, or quotes from Goethe; a sinister ballpoint-pen portrait of David Cameron and cards written by solicitors Birnberg Peirce explaining that you don’t need to give your name if searched. The walls are a sort of slogan competition, in the manner of a JCR suggestion book or a library toilet wall: which ones will last? In the ...”

“... and turned a scholar into a suppressor of evidence. I suggested the problem was one mentioned by David Hackett Fischer, that history is what the evidence says it is. If the evidence is fragmentary, misleading or missing, then the history is just going to be wrong, or at best incomplete. No, no, no. That was alright as far as it went. But Spender-Lehmann were ...”

“... Bernhard (1931-89) is marked by deaths: those of his majoritarian and minoritarian translators David McLintock and Ewald Osers, in 2003 and 2011 respectively; and in 2015 that of Carol Brown Janeway, his publisher at Knopf, his unlikely champion over decades (because, for all his influence and cultishness, Bernhard in English never exactly sold), and the ...”

“... destitution, or its schizoid sexual morality, or just the improving works of Samuel Smiles? We may never know, but there is more than a suspicion that the distinctly unpolymathic chemist/lawyer/housewife was just embroidering on a few simplistic items of Grantham family folklore. No matter that the nation relearns morality from such dubious sources. Other ...”

“... to literary examples, Manning traces the provincialising of Calvinist attitudes in the writings of David Hume, Jonathan Edwards, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. Far from a mechanical application of rigid doctrinal categories, Manning’s thoughtful critique shows how contradictory attitudes can arise out of, and in reaction ...”