“... 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 ...”

“... Kleinberg, ‘a sceptic by nature, and when it comes to religious phenomena . . . even more sceptical’, found that he accepted Mother Teresa’s claim unquestioningly. ‘For an instant, at least, I believed that those words were the pure truth,’ and that this absolute love for the leper dying in her arms ‘transformed the scene from a banal ...”

“... pursuit of moral ideals. Certainly, her life had a richly quirky and wilful side. But was it any more quirky than those of her male contemporaries – Shaw, Stead, Wilde or Yeats? This book goes a long way towards rescuing Besant from a condescending double standard. By any standard, this life was extraordinary: not because of any special originality of ...”

“... banal despairs that one feels Larkin had in mind, and this book is rather a study of the larger, more peculiar family life of Fitzrovian pub culture than an epic of the typically domestic version. Motion’s Tolstoyan incipit, ‘Families are societies in miniature,’ seems the wrong way round: this family was society writ large – its members were ...”

“... American sociologist, reporting on fieldwork he had undertaken at a psychiatric institution with more than seven thousand inmates. ‘My immediate object . . . was to try to learn about the social world of the hospital inmate, as this world is subjectively experienced by him. I started out in the role of an assistant to the athletic director, when pressed ...”

“... throughout his writing life. There isn’t much in the poetry that would provide fuel for the more significant engines of reputation. It is too heterodox in form and method, and too various to characterise or place comfortably in the context of contemporary British poetry, beyond the idiotic and self-marginalising labels of ‘outsider’ or ...”

“... vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”