“... Dominicans who introduced him to Catholic social teaching and the Aristotle-inspired theology of Thomas Aquinas, and joined a local cell of the Communist Party, where he learned about Marx, Engels and the contradictions of capitalism. He was dazzled by the intellectual treasures spread before him, but suspected he could not have them all. ‘One thing on ...”

“... pleasing serendipity: anthoi, logia, ‘a gathering of flowers’. The Elizabethans may have been more inventive, with their Handful of Pleasant Delights and Paradise of Dainty Devices, but an apologetic impulse remains apparent in the way they name miscellanies. How much has changed? We read The Golden Treasury or, as indicatively, The Rattle Bag. Our ...”

“... opinion that the judgment pertained strictly to abortion; but in a supporting opinion, Clarence Thomas suggested that the court ‘reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents’, including contraception, same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage. The Dobbs decision would have been unimaginable without Trump, who appointed three ...”

“... diplomatically and militarily outwitted by Philip II of France. In one view, John’s reign makes more sense as an ending of the cosmopolitan political settlement, sometimes called the ‘Angevin empire’, in which English kings also controlled territory in nearly half of France.Kings do hate to give up their claims, however. Well into the middle of the 13th ...”

“... fixed shape. Even large octopuses – the largest species, the Giant Pacific, has an arm span of more than six metres and weighs a hundred pounds – can fit through an opening an inch wide, or about the size of its eye. This, combined with their considerable strength – a mature male Giant Pacific can lift thirty pounds with each of its 1600 suckers ...”

“... Maud Gonne’s estranged husband, was executed after the 1916 Rising in Dublin, Yeats talked once more of marriage to Maud Gonne, and then became involved with her daughter Iseult, to whom he also proposed. Joseph Hone writes about this in his authorised biography of the poet, published in 1942. When Iseult finally rejected him in the summer of 1917, he ...”

“... Giandomenico Majone (Italy), theorist of regulation; the jurists Dieter Grimm (Germany) and Thomas Horsley (Britain); the sociologists Claus Offe and Wolfgang Streeck (Germany); the political scientists Christopher Bickerton (Britain), Morten Rasmussen (Denmark) and Antoine Vauchez (France); the historians Kiran Klaus Patel (Germany) and Vera Fritz ...”

“... and some pessimists are suggesting that there is little market for their type in Britain any more. Philip French has produced an effective introduction to the phenomenon of the 20th-century sage. Produced, not written: the book prints the scripts of three programmes he assembled for BBC Radio 3 in 1973, 1975 and 1977. They make a satisfying whole partly ...”

“... after the Civil War, when its remodelled big dome emerged as a symbol of the Union – by more than a few state capitols from California to Wisconsin, Utah to Mississippi. The very name ‘Capitol’, together with the Capitol Hill on which the building stands is an invocation of ancient Rome, the Capitolium and the Capitoline, the highest of the ...”

“... majority of genetic variation is found within so-called races, not between them. You may well have more in common genetically with someone of a different skin colour than with someone of the same skin colour. But culture came first in thinking about race, and it comes first today. The idea of ‘whiteness’ continues to be used to make powerful distinctions ...”

“... as many as half a billion people in the 20th century alone – and blinded and disfigured many more. It was, as Thomas Macaulay said, ‘the most terrible of all the ministers of death’, and its preferred targets were children. In the past, you may have had something like a one in three chance of getting the disease ...”

“... Divorce’ begins: Many divorce cases were handled in my father’s court. The court was nothing more than our living-room, where my father kept his religious books and the ark for the Torah scrolls. As the rabbi’s son, I never missed an opportunity to listen in on the petitioners who came for a divorce. Why should a man and a wife, often parents of ...”

“... of literary fraud. One of his first publications, Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782), takes sixty exhaustive pages to demolish those who still believed that Chatterton’s poems were genuinely medieval, and his edition of Shakespeare devotes thirty more to discrediting a feeble ...”

“... version’ of Malcolm’s ‘journalistic self’, sometimes refers to her own life, but more often distances herself through impersonal observation, generalisation and literary allusion. She introduces the book with a remarkable Jamesian epigraph about ‘the reporter and the reported’ from his 1896 essay on George Sand, in which he looks to a ...”

“... who disliked them (most people?) pointed the finger at his upstart ministers, and above all at Thomas Cromwell, whose personal role in ‘all this’ is still debated. The way in which the commotions began tends to support the view of, among others, Abraham Lincoln and Harold Macmillan that events are the motors of history, not policy ...”