“... single proposition to be made which was ‘not deceitful, and the tying our reason too close to it may in many cases be destructive. Circumstances must come in.’ In the 18th, David Hume believed that ‘parties from principle, especially abstract speculative principle’, were ‘perhaps the most extraordinary and ...”

“... then: one in Montreal in 1945, one in Toronto in 1958 etc. In particular, he tells the story of David Carr, a Manchester sailor who died in 1959, and was widely reported some years ago as having been the ‘first’ Aids victim. Over the course of some fifty pages, threaded in and out of the book, Hooper elucidates Carr’s tours of duty with the ...”

“... monastery of St Andrew, and several of these were in England in Anglo-Saxon times; they may be volumes imported by the second missionary wave. Later on, Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury from 668 AD, and his colleague Hadrian, a refugee from the Arab invasions of North Africa, brought books with them possibly from the Lateran Palace library or ...”

“... speaker’s click brings up the next slide. On the page we are out of his or her control, and we may get stuck or distracted. The idea that it is possible, desirable even, to arrive at a single winning set of cards, even at an agreed set of artists, has gone. Success lies in finding sequences that carry a narrative, although the notion that there is only one ...”

“... capacity to ‘intuit the intangibles of the psychology of his opposite number’. He may have learned about Pat Nixon’s love of pandas on the first evening of the presidential visit in 1972, as they chatted over shark’s fin soup and the People’s Liberation Army Band played ‘Home on the Range’. But he probably already knew how desperate ...”

“... You may fear, from the title of this book, that they’ve found yet another ‘Boleyn girl’. The subject of this biography has already been fearlessly minced into fiction by the energetic Philippa Gregory. But there is no sign so far that another inert and vacuous feature film will be clogging up the multiplexes ...”

“... of the Senses: that the sexual culture of the mid and late 19th century in the West, while it may not have been what we supposed, was nevertheless distinctive. It seems right to call this view the assumption on which Education of the Senses is based, if only because of the book’s design. It runs from ‘Victoria to Freud’, and is intended as the first ...”

“... a chilly forehead and a warm thigh, or St Simeon, being written by the tip of his stylus? You may prefer Marguerite Porete, burning alive with her book, or the rich black intersection of St John of the Cross or the pyroclastic whisper of Anonymous, Unknown Author. Or something a little closer to home – Jeannie, for instance, the family friend whom my ...”

“... order to demonstrate that I have not inadvertently farted. The secretary looks up inquiringly. She may just be thinking I am uncomfortable. She may, on the other hand, be thinking I have farted, and not once but three times. I am attending a funeral. It is crowded with mourners, many of them friends and acquaintances. I do ...”

“... and shits in America’. The group included Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr and David Kammerer. In August 1944, Carr stabbed and killed Kammerer. Near the end of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a lightly fictionalised and surprisingly engaging account of the murder and of the months leading up to it, written in 1945 by Kerouac and ...”

“... political science professor Liu Qing was ‘coupled’ with the economist Xue Zhaofeng (imagine David Runciman and Adam Tooze playing a warring couple on James Corden’s Late Late Show). Liu now gets stopped in the street by fans asking for autographs and selfies. His showbusiness experience has prompted him to think about how far removed academia is from ...”

“... a pile of skulls, a mass grave. Among the perpetrators is a pig-faced soldier wearing a Star of David and a helmet with ‘Mossad’ written on it. In the background stands a man with sidelocks, a crooked nose, bloodshot eyes and fangs for teeth. He is dressed in a suit, chewing on a cigar and wearing a hat marked ‘SS’: an Orthodox Jew, represented as a ...”

“... the enemy of churches. The Salisbury diocese has a history of wrong-headed deans. These gentlemen may have been top god-botherers but that was no reason to let them loose on one of the finest buildings in the world (exterior only). Thirty years ago, Hugh Dickinson proposed knocking down a Grade 1 listed wall to admit tourist coaches and so increase revenue ...”

“... was like without the internet’.In an essay on the work of Jean Piaget, the child psychologist David Elkind used the term ‘cognitive alien’ to suggest just how differently very young children see the world – believing, for instance, that the sun and moon follow them as they walk around. For Elkind, the main problem in education is communication: a ...”

“... keep at it. Some, notably Rosalind Belben, have even joined them. But most, like Robert Nye and David Plante, have expanded their canvases. The Johnsonian experimental novel has been more or less buried, just as the Little England novel has been more or less buried, beneath the linguistic intrusion of the Empire striking back. As a literary agent, I seem to ...”