“... towards TVEI (Technical and Vocational Educational Initiative), will represent one of the more remarkable pedagogic reversals of our time. The privileged place which the new curriculum gives (in my opinion, quite rightly) to British history is in singular contrast to the implosion which has taken place in English studies, and the abandonment – now ...”

“... a hen harrier. Probably, like his uncle, he rode out in the early evenings – my father was much more confident on horseback than on his feet. Sometimes Geddes takes Bob out for the day, driving on what he calls his ‘village doctor’s’ rounds. Having heard that Germany is fighting for her life in the east, Geddes believes that ‘the second year of the ...”

“... in western society of a direct knowledge of Greek and Latin, the need for translation became more palpable than at any time since the Middle Ages. Concomitantly, western aesthetic and political sensibility shifted to new horizons: to the cultures of Asia, in particular. Again, translation was the only mode of access. From the time of Browning and ...”

“... known what it meant. Another way of cloaking the same sentiment was ‘cosmopolitan’ – or, more forcefully, ‘rootless cosmopolitan’. In France, antisemitism was far more blatant. In the Paris of the 1870s, the diarist Edmond de Goncourt complained that even the grandest salons had become ‘infested with Jews and ...”

“... in an academic historian being voiced in Britain? The answer to this question seems to me far more interesting than trying to write the sort of conventional review for which I am palpably the wrong person. I prefer to enquire why such differences between the Continent and this country exist and to examine the work of Finley against the historiographic ...”

“... ACPO) does not wish the public to know. What panel scrutiny – or, in sensitive cases, the more elaborate investigations of vetting – allows is the exercise of the Crown’s right of peremptory challenge or ‘stand-by’, to remove obnoxious jurors from the panel. The Report of the Roskill Committee is anodyne and confusing on the matter of ...”

“... that there is no ‘responsive superthou’. It’s this kind of conception of God that moves Thomas Nagel to say: ‘It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God … It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.’ In Murdoch and Nagel I think we find the genuine spiritual impulse or ...”

“... outpolled him by half a million votes. Then in 2016 Hillary Clinton received nearly three million more votes than Donald Trump but still lost by a substantial margin – 304 to 227 – among the electors. Ask a man or woman in the street why this system of electing a president was adopted and how it works and you will almost certainly draw a blank. It’s ...”

“... every speech Blum made was interrupted by cries from the extreme Right, all of them coming down more or less to the two words: sale Juif. For the moment, we can pass over this distasteful episode in our history: anti-semitism is now taboo in France, at least in intellectual and political circles, and such incidents would be inconceivable today. Blum was ...”

“... changing paradigms. In the latter instance, the debate has been carried on within the Institute by Thomas Kuhn, who first described scientific revolutions in terms of ‘paradigm shifts’, and Dudley Shapere, who has tried to rescue the notion of objective truth, never complete but seen more and ...”

“... danceHeard they crowded the floorCouldn’t face it without youDon’t get around much any more.And then, going back almost to the beginning, there was the matter of those initials on the dedication page of The City and the Pillar. This homoerotic drama, Vidal’s second novel, won him attention and execration in about equal measure. The dedicatee was ...”

“... have been in it, as a writer and theoriser about both life and literature whose concerns are more timely now than they were when he was expressing them. He’s come well and truly out from the shadows in France in recent years and now we have the first book in English to have been devoted to him. It’s not the sort of book that’s going to be widely ...”

“... out of innate, inherited capacities, how much acquired from people around you? There is also a more communal question: how much of our social behaviour as a group – how we talk, how we love, how we argue, how we get angry – is peculiar to our local ways of living, and how much is determined by our shared animal nature? Geoffrey Lloyd’s book is the ...”

“... brains. One is implied directly: start at the beginning of life itself, tracing the appearance of more and more complex living creatures, some of which develop organs that better and better perform brain-like functions. This evolutionary story allows us to begin to understand the constraints governing the structure of ...”

“... The Rodney King four would be tried by their peers – that much was certain. The Clarence Thomas hearings and the William Kennedy Smith rape trial had introduced cable subscribers to something called the ‘Court Channel’. This service gives non-stop live coverage to high-profile trials. Cameras were allowed into the King trial, and every minute of ...”