“... and true knowledge. The floating of other men’s opinions in our brains makes us not one jot the more knowing, though they happen to be true. What in them was science is in us but opiniatrety, whilst we give up our assent only to reverend names, and do not, as they did, employ our own reason to understand those truths which gave them reputation. Or take ...”

“... holds a special niche permanently vacant for those bookish old ranters (Michael Foot, Norman Thomas) who can qualify for that sort of affectionate obituary even while they are still alive, the paradox of the traditionalist rebel does not automatically connote charm or breadth of mind. In the Puritan revolutions of old, and the Islamic ones of ...”

“... did the British Government. These embargoes were a nuisance to the merchants of death, but no more than that. As luck would have it, the Iran-Iraq war coincided with the election of President Ronald Reagan and his wild bunch, in particular his special friend and constant adviser, the former advertising mogul he made director of the CIA, William ...”

“... It is very provoking of W.J. McCormack to write in this benighted way. The less he has to say, the more fussy and fustian his manner becomes. On the poem ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, we get this: The title employs words, not numerals, but it employs one of several possible verbal formulations. It prevents us from particularising the year as One ...”

“... skits, squibs, facetious or satirical articles, jokes, paid for at space rates. Such a poet as Thomas Hood had already squeezed a precarious living from writing or editing ‘comic annuals’, and Punch and its imitators bought the work of innumerable freelances whose hunger enabled them to summon up humour on demand. A third possible source of income was ...”

“... do the state some service’ by ‘helping the present and future generations to realise more thoroughly than were otherwise possible the character of their ancestors’ collective achievement, of which they now enjoy the fruits’. Furthermore, the DNB was a monument to entrepreneurial zeal. Elsewhere, similar schemes were often state-aided ...”

“... creates a blind spot in political discourse. The parallels between Plotinus and Lacan are probably more than fortuitous. Lacan’s theory developed in the early 1930s through the synthesis of his teacher Henri Wallon’s ‘mirror test’ with some of the ideas he was picking up from his informal philosophical studies. At the time, Neoplatonism was also ...”

“... a strange reversal came about: rich people got thinner, poor people got fatter, rich people gave more of themselves to work, poor people gave more of themselves to leisure, and it was thought almost holy that Bill Gates earned more than the lowest-paid 40 per cent of Americans ...”

“... wits about us. The first two epigraphs to the book are plain sentences from the American novelists Thomas McGuane and John O’Hara about how we judge ourselves and others. The third epigraph is a sentence from Hamlet: ‘From the table of my memory/I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records/All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past/That youth and ...”

“... the Supreme Court whose rejection by the Senate resulted instead in the appointment of Clarence Thomas. Although legal literalism can crop up almost anywhere, its sharpest American manifestation, ‘originalism’, is a stalking-horse for a movement which wants to see a number of the Supreme Court’s most controversial modern decisions – those on ...”

“... was heading for a landslide victory in November’s election. The episode seemed to be nothing more than a ‘caper’ undertaken by over-enthusiastic underlings. Only Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, two inexperienced journalists on the local beat, persisted with the story. For the moment, the burglars kept quiet, and no mud ...”

“... we’ve used for as long as we can remember, such as curing, drying and fermentation, which free more glutamate from its protein bindings. In almost every region of the world some version of one of these methods has been handed down: in Russia it’s salted herring, in Poland smoked sausage. There’s the shrimp paste of the Philippines, the fish sauce of ...”

“... from the sand, the way they had watched their mothers glean loose sheaves from the fields. Thomas Peck, a labourer, gathered around twelve pounds of raisins, ‘which he did put into the sleeves of his coat and carry home with him’. The wife of Henry Harvest found only half that number, with ‘a great deal of gravel and sand amongst them’. The ...”

“... Stocking’s beautifully-edited Journals of Claire Clairmont had just come out, and she knew more about Claire than all the brains of the Byron Society put together. This did not stop those brains from working away at the Central Question – the sexual relations of Shelley and Claire. The Byron-worshippers were torn between those who were quite certain ...”

“... in bottles, in London chemists’ windows. The domestic slaphappiness of the monks in Sinai is more than balanced by that of the filthy students at Maynooth College, in Ireland. It is hard not to marvel at the expense of spirit shown in tracing the source of rivers, or in ensuring that Englishwomen, wherever they are, do not fall below their station; and ...”