“... On Man, his main conclusion was that human actions are, from a physical point of view, no more mysterious than the workings of an intricate clock. He saw no reason, as he put it in the Discourse on Method in 1637, to think that the human body had any powers beyond those of the marvellous ‘self-moving machines or automata that can be made by human ...”

“... its benediction. He wd/ have put in the cart. There is poetry in the white oxen (all the more, perhaps, for the cart’s omission), and humility. The poet, as Read put it, ‘contemplates the world of nature as the source of possible redemption.’ More solid even than the oxen, in moral and poetic terms, was ...”

“... a model – youth, maturity, ageing. In the early 19th century the English architectural antiquary Thomas Rickman looked at the changing styles of medieval Gothic windows and came up with the terms ‘Early English’, ‘Decorated’ and ‘Perpendicular’: church-crawlers still use that shorthand, not thinking much about the implied pessimism. An early ...”

“... and not likely to take on the question ‘compared to what’? Was Genghis Khan or Sultan Selim more important in ‘making the modern world’? Inventions or constitutions? Slave revolts or the British navy? Tea or drugs? Maths or ‘play’? A reader scanning bookshop shelves understands that such titles are just a way of saying that a particular ...”

“... It is unfortunate, really, that Schwartz has filtered into the general public’s consciousness more because of the outstanding copy his life has proved for other writers than because of his own work. Saul Bellow’s superb roman à clef, Humboldt’s Gift (1975), was modelled loosely on his relations with Schwartz in the late Forties and early Fifties, and ...”

“... of a sort, and a poet and writer of some gifts. To an extent probably greater than his more ‘educated’ antagonist Alger Hiss, he was in thrall to the potency of ideas. And he never doubted his own centrality: his sometimes subjective and at other times objective importance as an instrument of history. He had, in every declension of the word, a ...”

“... Germans, it was in enemy hands. By then Frank was dead. Beyond the Frontier carefully examines far more confusion than this. But perhaps the most general non-simplicity of all is the way Frank’s talents got him to the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border, and by what military means. Volunteering as an Oxford undergraduate of 19 at the outbreak of war, Frank had ...”

“... his new, original, sublime and sonorous music. Listen with an open mind, and you will feel this more keenly than can be expressed in words.’ Such passages were easier to write at the end of the 18th century than at the beginning of the 21st, especially when the author was a Prague professor of philosophy undoubtedly well schooled in rhetoric. Both Piero ...”

“... advertised Matthews’s three-part series from the Sierra Maestra, but his audacious reporting did more than startle readers: it made him one of the most reviled figures in American journalism. He had known controversy before. His dispatches for the Times during the Spanish Civil War were mutilated by his editors, pilloried by his critics and celebrated by ...”

“... milke’, ‘pore woman Fruterers’ and ‘ancient poore fishwifes’. The Elizabethan writer Thomas Lodge recalled a performance of a play that might have been a forerunner of Hamlet in which a ghost cried ‘Hamlet, revenge!’ in miserable tones like those of ‘an oyster-wife’. Selling food on the streets was one of the few public economic ...”

“... also a dubious one: ‘Laws are made by men, interpreted by men, and enacted by men … Law can no more rule us by itself, without human agency, than a cannon can dominate a city without an ironmonger to cast it and an artilleryman to load, point and fire it.’Since laws are not self-executing, one concern is that the ideal of the rule of law becomes the rule ...”

“... or even the Counter-Reformation. As far as I can tell, our family was completely invisible, no more than a conspiracy of inklings, until my great-grandfather became a schoolmaster in Kent, and his son became a headmaster in Essex, and his son, my father, Peter Bunting, fought with distinction, while only a very young man, in the Second World War, and after ...”

“... on Theresienstadt, who claimed that Eichmann himself had made these individual selections. Even more important, the prosecution’s general picture of a clear-cut division between persecutors and victims would have suffered greatly. Arendt’s point is that no prosecution would have wanted, and no defence would have dared, to address the forced ...”

“... into the marsh and then returned for another load, in a cycle repeated many times over – ‘more than one thousand cartloads’, according to John Stow – before the carters could be paid and sent home. Afterwards, the area was covered over with ‘soylage of the citie’ … [T]he carts were filled with human remains … [which] had been lodged in the ...”

“... in the presidential elections of the 1920s. In 1924, the party’s nominating convention required more than a hundred rounds of voting even to agree on a presidential candidate. Then, with the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, there was a remarkable reversal of fortunes. For decades afterwards, the party almost always controlled Congress and the ...”