“... that his body was altered in some fundamental way; there was a frog or serpent inside him. In 1685 Thomas Willis judged the melancholic-hypochondriac patient to be prey to ‘wandering pains, also cramps and numbness with a sense of formication’, as well as low spirits, wandering attention and fear of death. Since then the term ‘hypochondria’ has ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... searing shame for his country. Fest clearly found the cult of guilt unconvincing. If you looked more closely, he believed, you could see that the penitent was almost always blaming other people – his neighbours, his nation collectively – and never himself. There was a silent consensus not to stare into the bathroom mirror in the search for causes. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to convey characters’ speech and states of mind while English handled action and certain, often more formal, types of discourse. This approach reached its most radical realisation in How late it was, how late (1994), Kelman’s last novel before Translated Accounts, in which the dominant voice is the Glaswegian demotic of its blinded protagonist, the minor ...”

“... Alun Lewis is usually remembered as a war poet or, more precisely, as a soldier poet. ‘All Day It Has Rained’ is familiar to those who know nothing else about its author and to some who don’t usually read poetry. Ian Hamilton edited a selection of Lewis’s work, and there is a good biography by John Pikoulis ...”

“... has had continuing currency in Anglo-American political theory; and no one has contributed more than Skinner, a hegemonic figure in the study of political thought, to promoting the republican tradition. He has challenged Berlin’s conception of ‘negative’ liberty not by endorsing the ‘positive’ but by counterposing the liberal version of ...”

“... I don’t read any official estimates of the numbers though it’s to be hoped they estimate more accurately in the US than they do here, where any demonstration of which the police disapprove – the Stop the War marches, for instance – is routinely marked down whereas demos on which the police look kindly, the Countryside Alliance, say, are ...”

“... South America, is still quite audible, notably during wars and election campaigns, but albricias more and more carries the tune. More than two hundred years after independence, and 145 years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the United States is among the most racially-divided ...”

“... just because they are the judge. All I can tell you is I’ve heard that the higher the floor, the more senior the judge. But it could be homicide, child pornography, anything, going on. This is the criminal division.’I went up to the fourth floor and chose a court at random. The judge was questioning a frail-looking man in a T-shirt about his failure to ...”