“... enlightened development. Reaching the end of my biblical allocation of years brought on something more troubling than Nick Cave’s midlife mirror interrogation, his 20,000 Days on Earth. Hurtling to oblivion around the chicanes of the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre is not existential Brighton with Kylie Minogue and Ray Winstone onboard. For survivors of ...”

“... retreat in Streatham. Johnson was fond of calling Thrale ‘master’ – ‘I know no man who is more master of his wife and family than Thrale. If he holds up a finger, he is obeyed’ – but it was Hester who governed his intimate life. She ‘undertook the care of his health’ when Johnson first came to Streatham after the Thrales found him ‘on his ...”

“... the amorous and attractive Cunizza da Romano. Their next stop is the Sun, where the wise, such as Thomas Aquinas and Solomon, are congregated. Then they travel to Mars and meet heaven’s warriors, the Church Militant, including Dante’s great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida. Jupiter is the heaven of justice; moving on to Saturn, Dante finds the contemplatives ...”

“... lifted from another song on Cooke’s Live at the Copa LP.Maybe; but to my mind, it makes no more sense to imagine that Redding forgot the words to this song – already a Civil Rights anthem – than it does to think that Louis Armstrong had ‘forgotten’ the words to ‘Heebie Jeebies’. It may be closer to the truth to say that, outside his ...”

“... prominently, emphasising the luxury side of the journey (and its huge cost). What it isn’t any more is an adventure. Venice by train used to feel like Life, crossing the Channel and boarding the Paris train at Boulogne, getting a seat in the dining car before going round Paris on the ceinture and finding one’s sleeping car. It was an international ...”

“... exaggeration and distortion. Russell liked to present each change in his intellectual stance as a more or less sudden flash of insight. His story of how, as an undergraduate, he became an Idealist is a notable example. Having been persuaded by his tutor James Ward that the metaphysics of Idealism turned on the validity of the ontological argument, he was, so ...”

“... Strachey has sprung up in our midst, but because Mrs Thatcher – who polarises public opinion more forcibly than any prime minister since Gladstone – appropriates ‘Victorian values’ for herself and her party: ‘those were the values when our country became great,’ she told Brian Walden three years ago. The publication of these four books provides ...”

“... peculiarities of the American political system that you can call the president a moron – or, as Thomas Friedman recently put it on the front page of the New York Times, ‘flat-out dumb’ – but you can’t call into question the sanctity or power of his office. Whatever your complaints, the president has ultimate military authority, and there are plenty ...”

“... attention to his theories and to his life has been getting in the way of his poems. With Williams, more than the usual number of isms and caricatures need to be cleared away. There is, for example, Williams the spontaneous man who wrote by the seat of his pants, the grandfather (for good or ill) of the Beats; Williams the comical minimalist, who proved that a ...”

“... As a saga should be, it is based on oral tradition: the authors have spent years interviewing more than eight hundred people, recording ten million words. They show a remarkable command of scale, moving adroitly between the broad outlines of social history and the daily detail of Pollock’s life. They take the view that Pollock’s mother destroyed his ...”

“... whether any of these items, or the housemaid, were recovered. That isn’t surprising. What is more remarkable is that we know about their loss. Daisy Hay’s book covers a period in the second half of the 18th century when the magnification of the historical record is rapidly increasing. Details are becoming ever sharper. Hogarth’s ‘scenes of ...”

“... doesn’t actually trivialise, the suffering and dispossession brought by empire to its victims. More is said now about the modernising advantages the empires brought, and about the security and order they maintained. There is far less tolerance for the disorder and tyranny that people like Nkrumah, Lumumba and Nasser instigated in the name of ...”

“... Institute of Technology are fond of merry japes, locally known as ‘hacks’. One of the more memorable happened one night in October 1958 when an MIT fraternity had the idea of initiating new members by making them measure a bridge over the Charles River connecting the Cambridge campus with Boston. Crossing the bridge was often a wet, windy and ...”

“... from 1920 to 1924 and again from 1932 to 1949 – and his most enthusiastic missionary. He did more than anyone to disseminate the tenets of psychoanalysis around the globe; founded the American and British Psychoanalytic Societies; and launched the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. After Freud’s death in 1939, he effectively took charge of the ...”

“... to the stage but not too close, and felt ready to hear how threatening Ahmadinejad’s shadow was. More and more people crowded in and eventually filled every corner of the hall. Dore Gold was the first speaker. ‘John Negroponte,’ he began, ‘US director of national intelligence, said a week ago that in the Middle ...”