“... the ‘crystal-hard egoism’ of the prince by relentlessly exposing him to his own inadequacies, may well have done more harm than good. As one of Nicky’s Russian cousins later put it, ‘the education that was given us atrophied our powers and limited our horizons.’ It would be unfair to blame the teachers alone. The parents, with the exception of ...”

“... charmingly refers to as the ‘ubiquitous cigarette’ (recte, the inevitable cigarette: it may always be there, but it knows its place) looks shrunken to a bidi. ‘Quappi in Grey’ (1948) I take Beckmann to be one of the great painters of the 20th century, his life one of the great 20th-century artists’ lives, and his diaries, the Tagebücher ...”

“... winnowed out the slower links, and now only three firms remain in the race. (A fourth competitor may be about to emerge: it seems a new network is being built by Scientel, a specialist telecommunications firm with origins in the nuclear power sector. Scientel is probably doing this for an undisclosed HFT client, but I haven’t been able to discover whether ...”

“... of French women, but she also suggests that another, equally helpful model for American mothers may be found closer to home – in American fathers: unencumbered by outsized cultural expectations about what does or doesn’t constitute good parenting, and free from cultural judgments over their participation in the workforce, good fathers tend to judge ...”

“... involves imputing a considerable degree of foresight to the cats involved. She thinks the female may cultivate the challenger just in case his challenge is successful, so that he may spare her kittens on the assumption that they might be his. But can we comfortably impute this inference to a cat? The thing that does most ...”

“... from Philip IV, also in the female line, but now in the third generation. While the argument may have been relevant in the 1320s, when Philip IV’s last son died, it was meaningless by 1453, after more than a hundred years of war. By then it was obvious that no matter his heredity, a king of England couldn’t be king of France, precisely because he was ...”

“... the substance. Thales thought it was water. He recognised that living creatures require water, and may have made observations about evaporation and condensation. From this, he extrapolated that water was the necessary precondition not just for life, but for the whole cosmos. In his system the Earth floated on water: earthquakes could be explained by occasional ...”

“... language I think in,’ and if such a thing exists, the opening sentences of her two novels may well be written in it. The Manningtree Witches begins: ‘A hill wet with brume of morning, one hawberry bush squalid with browning flowers.’ (You can imagine a line break after the comma separating those disconnected images.) The first paragraph of The ...”

“... of an invasion in 2023. The news sometimes seems to provide support for their position. On 23 May, China began major military exercises around Taiwan that it described as ‘punishment’ for comments made by the new president in Taipei, Lai Ching-te, in his inauguration speech.Why must the war be over Taiwan, which since 1972 the US has officially ...”

“... like Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. ‘Dumb as a rock’ and ‘low IQ’ – he may be the last person on earth who mentions IQ – had no traction, considering that the stars of MAGA include the congresswomen Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, with their ‘gazpacho police’ and California wildfires started by Rothschild space ...”

“... method can also help him solve it. He encourages Eratosthenes to try it, speculating that others may find exciting new mathematics with it. When Heiburg’s transcription was circulated, it seemed to confirm a feature of Archimedes’ work that had been suspected for some time: some of his abstruse theories, particularly those about centres of mass, ...”

“... a master,’ to ‘break his own will and oblige him to obey a generally valid will whereby each may be free’ – but can only find such a master among other men, who are also animals that need to be mastered in their turn. It is this problem, of the unruliness of the ruler, that occasions the comment Berlin has taken for his motto. Kant, however, is ...”

“... Sophie’s death, three of Freud’s other children, Anna, Ernst and Mathilde, had fallen ill. In May that year his wife, Martha, after years of undernourishment as she tried to manage for the whole family through the war, went down with a case of ‘grippe-pneumonie’, with recurrent waves of high fever, from which she took two months to recover.Conditions ...”

“... ones. But the detail is fascinating. The speed with which changes took place suggests that fashion may have a constant velocity. And animadversions on the dress of the young, on the importation of foreign styles, the extravagance of women and the death of decency, speedily follow change. The most recent example of sumptuary law in this country (Second World ...”

“... The decision to begin the volume in 1727, at the accession of George II, is not defended and may be questioned: it lands us slightly awkwardly after the Hanoverian succession and in the middle of Walpole’s long period in office. Ireland and Scotland are pushed into the background. The Black Hole of Calcutta, so fearful an event to previous ...”