“... and his own ambivalence. What are the ‘two faces’ of his title? The first is a morally fatter, more aspiring form of liberalism, which asserts that there are general but substantial moral truths, universally applicable, on which liberalism’s claim to deliver the human good is founded. The second face is morally ...”

“... who became chancellor in 1969, and his successor, Helmut Schmidt, the BfV thrived. Its staff more than doubled from around one thousand in 1969 to more than two thousand in 1980. It expanded again during the war on terror, and then in the wake of Angela Merkel’s opening of the German border in 2015. By 2022 it had a ...”

“... Yourcenar was born in Brussels in 1903. She became a US citizen in 1947 and has lived for more than thirty years on Mount Desert Island, off the coast of Maine. Thus when she was proposed for membership of the French Academy, it was natural that some Frenchmen would make an issue of her nationality, in order to prevent a woman joining their ...”

“... at the official policy of allowing matters to take their course. ‘Machinery which renders labour more productive is not a good, but a mighty evil, if it diminish employment,’ Black wood’s argued. But it was, of course, the forces of popular radicalism, coming to a head in the Chartist movement, which voiced the keenest opposition. The alternative ...”

“... poems he wrote in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The asymmetrical volume of his output is one of the more obviously remarkable things about this remarkable collection: poems published between 1959 and 1995 occupy only about 150 of its 940 pages, while the work of Hill’s later years fills the remaining five-sixths of the book. Anyone who reads Broken ...”

“... both of which he shone as a scholar. Lord Mansfield, as Murray became, spanned the 18th century in more than simply years, though living from 1705 to 1793 was a good start. As chief justice of the King’s Bench for 32 years, he modernised an antiquated system of common law and rationalised a diffuse system of mercantile law; he drafted statutes; he played a ...”

“... whose powers were then in decline. He was handsome, suave (his advice to reporters was ‘to be more debonair’), charismatic and completely unstable – an alcoholic who suffered from manic depression, which worsened as time went on. He became famous for transforming the more colourful episodes of his illness into ...”

“... but at least one document (attributed to Cyril of Jerusalem) bundled all the Marys into one. More commonly, the Marys have combined and then divided, only to fuse again with other, unnamed women in Jesus’s circle. They seem particularly attracted to Mary Magdalene, to whom they cluster like pins to a dressmaker’s magnet. Over the centuries, the ...”

“... In a rather more judgmental time, history was sometimes written like this: ‘The evils produced by his wickedness were felt in lands where the name of Prussia was unknown; and in order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America ...”

“... It’s been a better predictor than things like form, which you’d have thought would be much more useful. So, anyway, the entrails say that it will be one of the Big Four that wins – most likely Brazil, the only team to have won outside their own hemisphere, and whose players are much more used to European football ...”

“... societies and settings. Physical distance is helpful (the father of letter-writing), marriages (more than one), a hint of scandal or controversy, achievement and neglect, both in moderation (poverty is a great preservative, celebrity or laurels a terrible corrosive, too obvious or excessive greatness is dreary). A late flowering is ideal, but not ...”

“... to an Irish correspondent the consequences of bringing Catholics into the constitution: A much more marked division than there is at present between Catholics and heretics, and a much closer union among all classes of the latter. The Catholics, having nothing to lose, will speak out more plainly. Those of the Protestants ...”

“... Edmund Gosse said he was ‘as restless and questing as a spaniel’. To William Henley he was ‘more the spoiled child than it is possible to say’. Henry James loved his writing – and loved mincing around its shortcomings – but saw him as ‘an indispensable light’. To others he appeared like a wraith or a tramp or a bag of bones, a ...”

“... Marxism​ is still very young, almost in its infancy,’ Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1957, more than seventy years after Karl Marx’s death. Sartre had first read Marx three decades earlier when he, too, was still very young. At the time, the author of Capital had seemed a figure of merely historical interest. ‘Here are the conceptions of a German intellectual who lived in London in the middle of the last century,’ Sartre remembered thinking ...”

“... Union survived the Civil War,’ he said, ‘the constitution did not. In its place arose a new, more promising basis for justice and equality.’ That new, more promising regime was Reconstruction, an array of reforms undertaken between 1863 and 1877 to refashion a fractured nation.In 1863 Abraham Lincoln issued the ...”