“... four allegorical novels of enormous length, typically about a humble ruler beset by hostile powers. Even as US tanks approached Baghdad in April 2003, he was overseeing the publication, with a forty thousand copy print run, of his last novel, Get Out, Damned One!, whose plot hinged on fearsome resistance to foreign occupation. His first novel, Zabiba ...”

“... and Bishop of Chester, displayed it in brilliant emendations of the text of Aeschylus. In 1662 Richard Bentley, one of the greatest critical scholars, was born near Wakefield. In 1700 he became Master of Trinity, and despite continual battles with the fellows survived until the age of 80. Bentley was an outstanding textual critic. His famous edition of ...”

“... were activities hugely dependent on the navies, armies and trading companies of the big imperial powers. The mutiny on the Bounty ruined a mission in imperial botany: Lieutenant William Bligh’s task had been to secure breadfruit trees from Tahiti, then carry them to the Caribbean to provide cheap food for slaves on the sugar-cane plantations. (The trees ...”

“... the only ones hungry for these insights. The popularisation of behavioural economics was led by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book Nudge (2008), which inspired the setting-up of ‘behavioural insights’ teams in governments around the world (with Cameron’s coalition government at the forefront), and has nurtured a view of policy that is attentive ...”

“... this or that physical attribute, or name, or occupation, or address. Readers familiar with Richard Ellmann’s biography of 1959 will be disappointed. Born in 1882, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was the first surviving child of John and May Joyce, whose recent marriage had been fiercely opposed by both sets of parents. Their first baby, named after ...”

“... only candidates for such highest-level desires are so abstract and empty as to have no mediating powers: for example, ‘I wish to be good,’ ‘I wish to be rational,’ ‘I wish to know the truth.’ What will count as good or rational or true will be determined by the contest between the first and second-level desires. Wistful top-level protestations of ...”

“... to mimic ‘illpair’d’ creations. Dulness is his imaginative resource, and a Goddess with powers so much greater than common stupidity: Laborious, heavy, busy, bold, and blind, She rul’d, in native Anarchy, the mind. In Book I, Pope has done little, beyond a shuffling of names, truly to transform Theobald into Cibber, yet Cibber, ‘the lively ...”

“... necessarily irrational. The broader framework pr0vides enhanced meaning and status, as well as powers far greater than those of natural family groups (there are exceptions, admittedly, like the Bush, Castro, Windsor and other dynasties). Behind this enhancement lies a powerful, indeed fundamental force. One might call it the enabling boundary. The import ...”

“... problem. So too, for many, is the God-human thing. That question hasn’t quite gone away – as Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists would like it to – but you don’t get published in philosophy or neurophysiology journals by invoking our unique relationship to a Creator God as a way of accounting for our mental and vital properties. The human-machine ...”

“... who dresses up in bogey-man costumes to frighten her into loosening her tongue. Clara’s magical powers enable her to locate the severed head of her mother (Nivea, another symbol of purity) lost in the woods after a car-smash: this head goes into the hat-box in the basement. Clara is too pure to concern herself with her sons or with any domestic ...”

“... Home Rule for Ireland​ would have given a new parliament in Dublin far fewer powers than Holyrood has today, but the mere prospect dominated British politics for extended periods over more than three decades. Three Home Rule Bills came before Parliament, in 1886, 1893 and 1912. The first was rejected by the Commons; the second was defeated in the Lords; the third passed the Commons, with the Liberal minority government being supported by the nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party ...”

“... lies an important earlier collection, the work published in 1972, edited by Peter Laslett and Richard Wall, as Household and Family in Past Time. This book established the remarkable constancy of average household size in England since the 16th century, despite people’s mobility, with a norm of a little under five persons until the low birth rate and ...”

“... become that in South Africa it is taken for granted that the new Constitutional Court should have powers of judicial review of legislation far wider than the peculiar circumstances of the country might have demanded. It is extraordinary how recently the courts began to have this final say in Western democracies. To an extent, informed opinion has been blinded ...”

“... republics tested the limits of central authority, and finding them infinitely elastic, used new powers or misused old ones to divert huge flows of central funds into local social programmes. The tables turned on Pavlov with dizzying speed: in his period in office the relationship between the centre and the regions, districts and cities flipped over. One ...”

“... of ‘the narrow gauge of the wheels’. We are regularly and justly impressed by Holmes’s powers of observation and inference. But there is no contest between ourselves and the detective, just as there seems to be none recorded between Holmes’s prototype, Dr Joseph Bell, and his pupils in Edinburgh – or, indeed, between that ...”