“... heart. Every tree, every hedge is a bouquet of blossoms and makes you want to turn into a May bug, so as to float in this sea of fragrances and draw all your nourishment from it. A May bug? Goethe’s Maienkäfer is an odd word, either an old form of Maikäfer (‘cockchafer’) or a misprint for Marienkäfer ...”

“... Sir Henry Wotton, sent a copy to James I, describing it as ‘the strangest piece of news (as I may justly call it)’ that he would ever have received ‘from any part of the world’. Most copies were probably sent over the Alps by Tommaso Baglioni, the book’s nominal publisher, or his boss, the excommunicated polemical printer Roberto Meietti, now in ...”

“... onwards. Second, and crucially, it severs the link with mental illness: Lullin’s eyesight may have dimmed but his cognitive faculties were perfectly sharp, and he had no difficulty recognising his hallucinations as unreal. Sacks’s boldest move is to exclude hallucinations associated with schizophrenia, on the grounds that they demand ‘separate ...”

“... brats. ‘She had 2 Bastards, others say Three,’ Pope adds in a manuscript comment that he may have had from the struggling poet and hellraiser Richard Savage. In typically tantalising style, Curll alleged in print that the ill-matched babes were ‘Offspring of a Poet and a Bookseller’. The first task for any Haywood biographer, plainly, is to clear ...”

“... tolerance and language fluency. Although he responded to each test as if it were his first, he may have developed a vague undertow of déjà vu; he once remarked to a researcher with characteristic drollery: ‘You just live and learn. I’m living, you’re learning.’ Yet some aspects of his inner life remained mysterious. Did he, for example, remember ...”

“... people to haul loads. A single horse can exert enough force to pull up to thirty tonnes. This may seem astonishing and incredible, but it is really quite simple. Wheels are very well made and roads are well surfaced. Anyone acquainted with contemporary Japan’s superb public transport network may be surprised that ...”

“... Whatever may be the judgment of time on the intrinsic value of Renan’s contribution to the sum of knowledge, he can never lose his place among the few great names in the history of letters.’ This assessment from the 1901 edition of Chambers’s Encyclopedia, equally striking today for its confidence and its remoteness, summarises the conventional wisdom at the beginning of the 20th century ...”

“... of messages exchanged between members of al-Qaida during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011; many ended: ‘destroy after reading.’ There was also a 220-page handwritten document inaccurately described by the CIA as bin Laden’s ‘journal’: for the most part, it is a transcription of family discussions during the last two months of bin ...”

“... the Angel Gabriel. This (the First Joyful Mystery) preoccupied me from the age of nine or ten. I may not have got my period, I may have been years from letting any of the lads from school put a hand up my skirt in the handball alley, but the anxiety persisted. Gabriel might show up at any moment and announce that the Holy ...”

“... She is annoyed when her individual circumstances are taken as proof of structural inequality. She may think of herself as an outsider to a certain kind of feminism, to the marketing of ‘self-care’, to the relentless insistence on empowerment, transformation, healing and sharing. The thought of posting online with a hashtag repels her. She ...”

“... and Cardiff have become places apart. As the days tick away before the Holyrood elections on 1 May 2003, Labour seems in better shape than the SNP: John Swinney lacks the lethal charm of his predecessor, Alex Salmond, and his members went out of control when selecting candidates for the regional list system, ditching the best and brightest. But the polls ...”

“... has an intrinsic or a purely instrumental value. For much conservative thought, democracy may have its uses, but it is hardly a good in itself. Better for a single sovereign to reach the right decision than for a sovereign people to botch the business. And though democracy may thrive in English soil, it ...”

“... no one talks of feeling a bit violated – that is important about Arbus’s work, though it may be truer to say that Arbus’s work more often shows us how inviolable modern human privacy is: however close or close up you get, you never get that close. And that there’s something about modern life that generates fantasies of closeness, of ...”

“... the purview of local government. The dismal result for Labour in England’s local elections on 7 May was not predominantly a revolt over bin collections. It was strongly related to national revulsion for Labour, and to the country’s transformation into a multi-party democracy administered by a system set up for duopoly. In 2025, Reform took control of ten ...”

“... reason and feeling coincide. In this part of his lectures he is profoundly opposed to Hume. (We may note that Madison did not recommend either Hume’s Treatise or the Enquiries to the Library of Congress.) Witherspoon’s positive doctrine combined, without his apparently ever noticing the tension between them, a version of Hutcheson’s moral sense theory ...”