“... it would mean fifty sextillion or so planets in the observable universe where intelligent life may have evolved. The chances of Earth being the only one to have realised that potential seem ridiculously small. It’s safe to assume we’re not alone.That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that the chances of intelligent life developing on Earth were ...”

“... policy efforts to marketise by design.The second story about universities is the one that may be more familiar to those who have looked on from a distance. Across the Western world in the 1960s, campuses were crucibles of politicisation and left-wing organisation, shaping the ‘new social movements’ that followed in subsequent decades. But a ...”

“... but certain, in Godfrey-Smith’s view, that octopuses have rich subjective experience. But they may have even more than this. According to some theorists, notably Stanislas Dehaene, a particular kind of mental processing, the sort that involves completing novel tasks extended over time, not only goes hand in hand with human consciousness, but helps explain ...”

“... seems to have preferred the expression ‘the Jewish Catastrophe’. At this stage ‘holocaust’ may have been more commonly attached to the prospect of nuclear war. The shift undoubtedly came in 1963 with the controversy surrounding Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, which set in motion an intense public interrogation of Jewish conduct during the Nazi ...”

“... turned down von Ranke’s own vacated chair in Berlin. The fans of the lectures on Greek culture may have been dilettantes, but they were dilettantes of the highest order, including both Nietzsche and Freud. Indeed, Nietzsche’s flatteries became so extravagant – ‘that profoundest student of Greek culture now living’, ‘our great teacher’, ‘I ...”

“... However​ dissentious, alienating, confusing and anxious life may have been for most of the English under the Tudors, the period, especially its last two decades, has usually been remembered as an idyllic apogee of national self-definition. By the time Shakespeare and his apprentice John Fletcher co-wrote All Is True (printed as Henry VIII) in 1613, wistfulness for the previous reign was already growing, despite what the playwrights and others may have recalled about Tudor rule: agricultural depression, enclosure, the plague, the poor law and the Essex Rebellion ...”

“... of his having ‘arrived’. In daydream moments in between the usual author agonising, Podhoretz may have anticipated the publication of Making It as a climactic solo bringing down the curtain on act one of his career and a springboard for his next move. The book was certainly stagecrafted that way. If so, he misjudged the composition of the audience and the ...”

“... separately back in 1984 (War Diaries: Politics and War in the Mediterranean, January 1943-May 1945). Those diaries were published pretty much entire and contain fine descriptions of North Africa as well as sharp pen portraits and nippy asides. And besides, they describe an extremely delicate and fascinating mission, told as deftly as it was ...”

“... so much of what is hateful about the world since Mrs Thatcher in that gritty hard little word. 2 May. Several of the obituaries of Alan Sillitoe who died last week mention how, when as a child he was being hit by his father, his mother would beg ‘Not on his head. Not on his head.’ My father was a mild man and seldom hit my brother or me but when he did ...”

“... was in many ways a book for its time. Tuchman’s story begins with Edward VII’s funeral on 20 May 1910. The king’s sister-in-law, the empress consort of Russia, Maria Feodorovna, wife of Alexander III, was there. So was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the aged Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. And so was Edward’s least favourite ...”

“... both – like Agrippa – predeceased him. Tacitus suggests that Augustus’ third wife, Livia, may have had a ‘secret hand’ in their deaths, though Suetonius in this instance doesn’t stoop to repeating such unsubstantiated rumour. Augustus then adopted their younger brother, Agrippa Postumus (so named because he was born soon after his father’s ...”

“... months after Giraud arrived on Ile de France. As soon as he stepped off the boat from France in May 1777 Giraud was placed in chains and confined to prison. On 15 August, in the late afternoon, he and another prisoner, a young boy named Cézar, were digging a trench close to the island’s administrative headquarters. Giraud and Cézar were chained ...”

“... deeply troubled by his mother’s mysterious death, goes out of his way to find a little boy who may be able to tell him exactly what happened. When he asks the boy’s mother for permission to speak to the child, she looks at him ‘in a peculiar and criticising manner. To anybody but a half-blind man it would have said, “You want another of the knocks ...”

“... By my count, though I may have missed a few, this is the 25th volume of Ezra Pound’s highly distinctive correspondence to see the light of day. The first selection of his letters, edited by D.D. Paige and culled from the years 1907-41, was published in 1950, when Pound was four years into what would be a 12-year sojourn in St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, to which he’d been confined indefinitely after pleading insanity at his trial for treason in 1946 ...”

“... Duhauttoir; Françoise herself lent Danton some of the purchase price. A 1964 biographer, Robert Christophe, speculated that Françoise may have had a child by Danton, and that he paid an inflated price to settle his obligations. He certainly drew on the dowry for his upcoming marriage to Gabrielle ...”