“... detail to convince us that this was no trivial threat. Drawing on the work of Don Fehrenbacher and Paul Finkelman, McPherson also presents a very clear explanation of the significance of the Dred Scott case, in which the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Taney declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820 unconstitutional, and added for good measure that when the ...”

“... by leaving a roll of gauze in the nasal cavity, Freud vomited with shock but later, rather than lay the blame squarely on Fliess, began to interpret her haemorrhage psychologically. She was made of stern stuff, however (‘So this is the strong sex!’ she taunted Freud when he blenched at the blood), and blamed neither doctor, going on to become a ...”

“... tells us that early in the war editors and publishers ‘began to receive a flow of new work which lay outside any of the literary beginnings with which they were familiar. It was sharp, colourful and often political.’ Well, very likely a tiny percentage of it actually was ‘sharp’ and ‘colourful’, whilst in the nature of things most of it must have ...”

“... warning round or two from armed looters in the port. I suspect, however, that the real attraction lay in the fact that so few others knew quite how good the Somalia story was, or indeed quite how bad. The few others became many in December. The curiosity of the American networks in particular was such that a press corps cheeseparingly estimated at three ...”

“... An ow tha’s got to leather em To stop em gi’in t’nod. An some o t’same in Bible Where Paul screams fit to bust Ow men are fallen creatures But womenfolk are t’wust. Now I reckon this fired Peter, An men-talk were is goad, An culprit were our belderin God An is ancient, bullyin road. No, Pete weren’t drove by vengeance, Rountwistedness or ...”

“... coming to tell us it was over, I could stand it no longer, and threw myself on the bed, where I lay in stillness, neither hearing nor seeing anything.’ The proximity of their daily lives fostered the sense of shared identity that Wordsworth celebrated in a fragment from 1800: My hope, my joy, my sister and my friend Or something dearer still, if reason ...”

“... owes nothing to Classical models, is very far from being ‘primitive’ either. Like the work of Paul Zumthor in the field of medieval literature, Schapiro’s essays help us to see the inadequacy of notions of artistic norms derived from the Renaissance. ‘The standard of nature is an obstacle to critical insight,’ he remarks at one point in his ...”

“... with fellowships and awards. If she could overcome an addiction to the historic present she might lay claim to a considerable straight-forward descriptive skill. But this is wasted here on a chronicle of mere behaviour, unmitigated by any of the specifically human attributes of will or mind. Lettice Cooper writes a kind of novel that one would expect to be ...”

“... adopting the principles of John Stuart Mill in its dealings with Lukacs. And when therefore John Paul II – who, like Evelyn Waugh, as Randolph Churchill remarked to an earlier Pope, is himself a Roman Catholic – did not respond to Dr Küng’s appeals against the requirement that he no longer teach as a Catholic theologian, he did only what rational ...”

“... changed his positive allegiances a good deal; Michael Sandel, like Charles Taylor and Pope John Paul II, makes a great thing of ‘identity’. They stress the difference between the way we are ‘constituted’ by our membership in a variety of communities and the ‘abstract’ individuals that thinkers obsessed with rights write about. Seen from this ...”

“... pathologist are called at random, and the testimony of each is given equal weight by the lay judge and jury, or is estimated by law standards. I would urge upon you, as a jurist, that of all branches of medicine experimental pathology is the most highly technical, expert and difficult, requiring rare natural gifts and long and critical ...”

“... pages, showing Shell posters or School Prints, work by Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Paul Nash. As early as May 1930, another editor, Betjeman’s mentor Philip Morton Shand, part of whose enviable brief was to travel Europe in search of articles to translate and buildings to publish, but who also pursued his own parallel interests in wine and ...”

“... with sympathy as well as humour, but also reminds us of the immense intellectual excitement that lay behind what could seem to be mere pedantry. Colocci was doubtless distracted from making progress with his treatise by his perception that it held the key to huge parts of ancient Roman civilisation – cartography, grain supply, census and tax systems, and ...”

“... stability in the first third of the 18th century. For him, Jacobitism’s primary significance lay in giving Whig politicians a convenient smear: it enabled them to denounce their political rivals, the Tories, as unreliable crypto-Jacobites who could not be trusted with office under the Hanoverians. In so far as Jacobitism had any real existence beyond the ...”

“... in confidence. What I tell him is quite wonderful, quite complicated, and altogether untrue. I lay it on thick, and he believes me.’ When the artist is all but killed by his card-playing companions, the narrator becomes his saviour and caregiver, and perhaps this is the role he unknowingly wanted: friendship as a form of unreturned devotion. Even a king ...”