“... It must feel odd – and more than a bit unsettling – to realise that sooner or later, perhaps in your lifetime, somebody will write your biography. Biographers can get lives badly wrong; and even when they get things right, giving attentive accounts with the salient facts in order, they may leave out friendships and discoveries that contributed greatly to a writer’s inner life ...”

“... from its changing scientific basis. But historians of science followed Butterfield’s preaching more than his practice. By the 1960s and 1970s, most of them had come to consider progressivism and presentism as professional sins, and embraced what anthropologists called ‘charitable interpretation’. This left them exposed, both to scientists, many of whom ...”

“... graduates and/or instructors), divided into three main groups: ‘technomodernism’ (John Barth, Thomas Pynchon), ‘high cultural pluralism’ (Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros) and ‘lower-middle-class modernism’ (Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates), with Venn diagrams illustrating the overlap between these groups, and their polarisation by aesthetic ...”

“... one. He actually acquired an image, which was fostered by the 1790s media, especially by a host of more or less funny novels which featured him performing appropriate professorial actions. As Mr Vapour, he was made to illustrate his doctrine of perfectibility with an experiment to train sparrows to swarm like bees. As Dr Stupeo, he set out to establish a just ...”

“... the medical profession began the process of putting the treatment of the mental illnesses on a more scientific footing. The 19th century saw the identification of a number of organically-based mental diseases, while the early 20th century saw the development of a scientific psychological medicine, informed by the writings of both Meyer and Freud, which ...”

“... but eventually you may proceed to a full (or utility) patent, where property rights are wrapped up more securely, and, while IP lawyers make fortunes from litigation about who in fact owns the property, basically the matter is now in the domain of formal law. If the university does manage to license the IP, you will get perhaps 35 per cent of the royalty ...”

“... Anthologies attract good haters. In the 1790s, the reformer Hannah More blamed their editors for the decay of morals: to let people assume that you had read the entire work from which an anthology piece was excerpted, she warned girls, was no better than lying outright. In the 1840s, less predictably, Engels took time out from The Condition of the Working Class in England to sneer at the anthologies littering the sofa tables of the Manchester bourgeosie ...”

“... of rising inequality, labour market precarity and escalating housing costs, it has become more and more difficult to pretend that ‘hard work’ is an adequate basis for supporting a family. Governments pursuing austerity policies are unwilling to supplement wages to the degree needed to lift all working people out ...”

“... Until the 17th century this country remained, in this respect, on the fringe of Europe. Then Thomas Gataker, who turned down the Mastership of Trinity, practised critical scholarship in his commentary on Marcus Aurelius, and John Pearson, an eminent theologian, who was successively Master of Jesus, Master of Trinity and Bishop of Chester, displayed it in ...”

“... cautions against hypocrisy. Mr Parkinson finally resigned on the morning of Friday, 15 October, at more or less the hour that copies of the last edition of the Times, complete with Miss Keays’s statement, went on sale in Blackpool. The overwhelming consensus now was that Mr Parkinson was right to resign. Various factors were blamed. Miss Keays’s wish for ...”

“... as one might expect, some wild interpretation, but there was also a newly-orientated authority, more philological and scholarly than before. It was this Protestant tradition that led eventually to Schleiermacher, whose object was entirely intentionalist in that he sought to restore the sense a text had had for its author and for the original audience. As he ...”

“... Was Thursday; books which have had their adherents not just among the GKC brigade, but among the more obviously tangential literary observers of this century. Kafka, for example – as Pearce reminds us – read The Man Who Was Thursday, and another admirer was Borges. I remember having a conversation with the great Argentinian about The Man Who Was Thursday ...”

“... organised (not recognisably human enough) to treat with. That they were not seen only made them more feared in the remote early settlements at Sydney Cove and elsewhere. Just what claims to humanity or justice those original occupants might have is a question that remains to be answered. Henry Reynolds, in his books The Other Side of the Frontier (1981) and ...”

“... he’s 47, he reflects: ‘Nothing achieved. What happened to the tune he had started to write more than thirty years ago and was going to send to the Beatles? Nothing. What had he made since? Nothing, beyond a million tennis strokes, a thousand renditions of “Climb Every Mountain”.’ He’s weary, perhaps, disappointed certainly – but that’s just ...”

“... He died in 1984, while Junior was still an ageing frat boy, and didn’t live to see this far more applicable text. For the questions that he, even then, declared hopelessly obsolete are the very ones that should not be asked about Decision Points ‘by’ George W. Bush (or by ‘George W. Bush’): ‘Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone ...”