“... he is not ‘a highbrow with intellectual leanings’ but ‘a simple, rather stupid man’. This may have been said only to outbid Elspeth Huxley in a modesty contest, but he could sometimes be genuinely overawed by the company. Arriving at a very grand luncheon party, he saw ‘ten sophisticated guests assembled’ and would have bolted had his wife not ...”

“... Chartreuse would never really die. Here he is, showing off to a duchess at the Carlton: ‘There may have been disillusionments in the lives of the medieval saints, but they would scarcely have been better pleased if they could have foreseen that their names would be associated nowadays chiefly with racehorses or the cheaper clarets.’ Clovis has been ...”

“... up front to those of us who would like to treat Hobbes as a modern rational choice theorist. We may be interested in game-theoretic models of social contract among self-interested rational agents, says Skinner, but it’s wrong to assume that Hobbes was, or to assume he was simply because some of his vocabulary matches our vocabulary, without considering ...”

“... Day’, a sort of diary of what Tom Nairn did and felt on the unforgettable rainy Thursday of 6 May 1999. It was the first polling day for the reconvened Scottish Parliament. As Nairn drove back from Fife, where he had gone to say goodbye to a dying friend, he passed through some shaggy badlands country and was reminded of Dunn’s Among bracken, in his ...”

“... to destitution. James Mangan – ‘Clarence’ was a later addition – was born in Dublin on 1 May 1803, ‘amid scenes of blasphemy and riot’, if we are to credit a fragment of autobiography he wrote in the last months of his life. As epigraph to that bizarre document, Mangan quoted two lines he claimed to have found in Philip Massinger, though no one ...”

“... claim: ‘This change began, to speak approximately, as we must, in the 17th century and may be described as the transition in the art of the West from a poetics of hallucination typical of Spenser to a poetics of delirium, inaugurated by Milton’. The West? That is a large claim. The change Teskey claims Milton represents is not a clean ...”

“... producing it: that in devious ways social origins reproduce themselves. However oblivious Bourdieu may have been to the contrary force of his own example, he deserves credit for showing that, on the whole, social origins do reproduce themselves – a simple, indignant premise that sent him off to explore a fascinating variety of archives. In Homo ...”

“... out of ten people who have experienced depression once will do so again. The idea that melancholia may stimulate, or be the price of, deep understanding and creative endeavour goes back beyond Ficino, and in recent times has been explored by Julia Kristeva (Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia), Kay Redfield Jamison (Touched with Fire) and others. It seems ...”

“... Fundamental Issues of Greek Science’ is followed by one on the Chinese ditto. An idle reader may wonder why ‘sciences’ is plural in the titles of the Chinese chapters and singular for the Greeks; and why ‘framework’ is singular in both cases. What do the comparisons between the Eastern and the Western backgrounds show? Well, there is a lot in ...”

“... its mast’ring power, I scarce can fathom, thou wilt never know;My lighter passions into rhythm may glow;This is forever voiceless. Could the flowerOpen its petall’d thought, and praise the dowerOf sunlight, or the fresh gift of the dew,The bounteous air that daily round it blew,Blessing unweariedly in sun and shower,Methinks would miss its ...”

“... have seen the living human as the embodiment of a number of souls or life-forces; the corpse may host only a part of their identity or cohabit with another entity. It’s understandable that the dead should be angry or vengeful: after all, they have suffered a terrible calamity. There may be, as Freud proposed in Totem ...”

“... can probably tell you more about their unconscious minds than their dreams can. But then again, it may just be that in a past life I helped sell rhinos to the ancient Greeks. Martin Amis, whatever he may have been in a past life, is currently turning into Gyles Brandreth. Blazoned across the Daily Telegraph on 13 June were ...”

“... Especially you who have not made confession Since yesterday, or else these trepidatious Phantoms may flit before your uncleansed presence, Or Cacodaemon with his greasy jowls Gulp you right down and flense your sin-drenched shanks!’ Act Four. A local yokel, The Boy Martyr, Is hauled out to the stake. He knows Lang’s game, But still he’s ...”

“... not something that the Baron himself was ever remotely guilty of so far as I know; a liar he may have been but a heroically implausible one, not even asking to be believed let alone hustled off into hospital. The proxy bit that is now used, if not to fine-tune the diagnosis then at least to confuse it, is potentially rather sinister, implying as it does ...”

“... he’s just turned 30 and gets injured rather a lot: a decent 90 mph is about his limit. What he may be, on the other hand, is the author who wins the William Hill Sports Book of the Year prize for 2001. Were he to do so, it would re-raise an intriguing question raised in the case of the 2000 prize. This went to Lance Armstrong, the American cyclist who has ...”