“... the full excitement of the ‘pursuit of the obvious’; acknowledge that ‘ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary.’ In Heretics (1905) Chesterton even talks about ‘the ecstasy of being ordinary’, which seems to be going a bit far, even for an ordinary man. The ...”

“... at the Bedford Assizes in February 1658, probably following a complaint from the local vicar, Thomas Becke, who was a Presbyterian. Bunyan’s legal torments began in earnest when he was invited to preach at the hamlet of Lower Samsell on 12 November 1660. When he got there, a friend told him there was rumoured to be a warrant for his arrest, but he ...”

“... monarchy seems of a different order: not a modern starting-point of institutional development, more an exotic intermission. If this is so, however, there remains a paradox. For what would be the most barren convulsion has produced the most fertile literature. The volume of modern writing on the French Revolution – the only possible rival – is larger ...”

“... lies the vast black squatter camp of Inanda, whose huddling shacks house half a million people or more – the only way to perform a census is to take an aerial photograph and allow for six people per shack. On Inanda’s eastern edge lies the historic Gandhi Settlement, founded by the Mahatma before he set off to lead the struggle against the British in ...”

“... Focillon in his book on the year 1000 identified as ‘centurial mysticism’, an affliction even more likely to be endemic when the century that is ending is also ending a millennium. These chronological divisions are meaningless in themselves, but, as Focillon argued, we tend to project onto them aspirations and anxieties which have quite other ...”

“... of people of my sort, the barrack-room lawyers, and he had a ‘right-wing’ appeal for the more regimental sort, Old Comrades, the British Legion, the cricket, golf and football club members. He exerted some authority even in the Royal Family and he had, surely, much more sex appeal than Hitler, say, or ...”

“... Europe with her tubercular sister and widowed mother: a series of autobiographical sketches – more rosy and much more plaintive than her books for children – record her wailing at schools, romping in orchards, screaming at the dark in strange lodging-houses. As a young woman, she had written verses about wild wet ...”

“... laws and legal systems of two reigns separated by four centuries and linked ostensibly by nothing more than the name of the incumbent monarch. But the comparison is more than a convenient artifice. Baker develops a case that in many respects ‘1952 was closer to 1558 than to 2020.’ His thesis is that, while change has ...”

“... per cent controls a mere 4.2 per cent; or that the richest thousand or so billionaires are worth more than one and a half billion of the world’s poorest people; or that the wealth of the world’s three richest people is equal to the combined GDP of the 48 poorest countries. It’s like being able to look up at the world’s highest mountain and then ...”

“... Camp, the Justice of the Jewish Pogrom, the Tranquillity of Imperialist War’). But probably more popular with most readers were the complaints about corporal punishment, compulsory OTC and the restrictive rules of girls’ schools, as well as the upbeat reassurances about masturbation. In the fourth and final issue, ‘a doctor’ wrote to dispel the ...”

“... minister.’ There will be no end to the embarrassment, for the correspondences can be no more disproved than proved, there being no evidence outside the plays with which to test conclusions derived from them about Shakespeare’s political outlook or connections, if he had any. Equally, there is nothing to say whether his audiences detected topical ...”

“... him: the Ramsey effect is what happens when you find your apparently novel insight anticipated, more elegantly, by Frank Ramsey.Yet Ramsey’s name isn’t widely known. His work is often inaccessible, a fact of which he was dispassionately aware: philosophy, he noted in a talk given in 1925, ‘has become too technical for the layman’. Then there’s his ...”

“... and then all the stars of heaven will cascade to the ground. The events of the third day may seem more benign: the sea shall ‘stand even in his cours agayn … with-outen mare rysng or fallyng’. But in the hurly-burly of apocalypse, a placid sea can be unnerving too.The ebb and flow of water was essential to medieval understandings of time. As Chaucer put ...”

“... sciences teaches no moral lesson, offers no spiritual comfort, have concluded that science is no more than the handmaiden of technology. These philosophers have ranged themselves alongside the political utopian and the innovative artist. Whereas the first kind of philosopher (a kind common in Britain and America, and exemplified by even such relatively ...”

“... the single currency has turned into a monetary choke-lead, forcing a swathe of economies – more than half the Eurozone’s population – into perpetual recession. The Greek economy has shrunk by a fifth, wages have fallen by 50 per cent and two-thirds of the young are out of work. In Spain, it is now commonplace for three generations to survive on a ...”