“... book consists of an attack on the claims of philosophy to provide ethical answers to the question. More precisely (since it never quite explains what is to count as philosophy), it attacks the claims of a certain rationalistic and foundationalist method in moral philosophy, a method broadly though not exclusively associated with Kant. In general, Professor ...”

“... generally regarded as anthropophagy at its most respectable. The Antaeus piece is the jazzier and more anecdotal, though the level of self-exposure is modest (Davenport owns up to living by preference on fried baloney, Campbell’s soup and Snickers bars). The title is ‘The Anthropology of Table Manners from Geophagy Onward’, ‘geophagy’ being the ...”

“... from the after-effects of a childhood cricket injury.Biographers of Grey, including the latest, Thomas Otte, have taken these three incidents in their stride, granting them a few incurious sentences at most. Instead they have dwelled on Grey’s love of homely nature: his passion for fly-fishing and bird-watching, his long weekends in Hampshire, his ...”

“... or (in one of the most bizarre legislative expressions of Protestant paranoia) own a horse worth more than £5.Pope was born in 1688, the year of the Glorious Revolution, which for Catholics was rather less glorious than it was to their Protestant countrymen. Despite his size, his religion, and the sinister nominative determinism of his name, he managed ...”

“... to the Serious Crime Squad of that force. Most recently, the Home Secretary’s proposal to send more people to prison has been attacked by prison governors and half a dozen of the country’s senior judges. The abandonment of the trial of the West Midlands police officers had been preceded by the trial of three Surrey police officers for perjury and ...”

“... so creatively if the book had not made a huge impression ten years before. The witty knight – as Thomas Shelton, Cervantes’s contemporary and most sinewy English translator, termed Don Quixote – had ridden instantly into the world’s imagination along with his squire. Even so, Cervantes may have had one reason at least to be grateful to the apocryphal ...”

“... its distribution. Yet there were reasons to be fearful, and in Cold War American culture there was more than enough fear to go around. Some forms of fear specially afflicted scientists. First, there was concern that political support might translate into political control. There were the Marxists – not all that many, of course, in America – who had ...”

“... their rivals. The result is extraordinary and often depressing. ‘Unexpected disasters,’ Keith Thomas wrote in Religion and the Decline of Magic, ‘the sudden death of a child, the loss of a cow, the failure of some routine household task – all could, in default of any more obvious explanation, be attributed to the ...”

“... annotations to his collection of attacks on himself and you will see Pope embroiled in a struggle more compulsive than any of the fencing of the Restoration wits whom he followed. It is often impossible to know whether all his marginal lines and crosses, his underlinings and apostrophes, are scratched in anger or in triumph. Perhaps it is often both, for they ...”

“... and viewer. Instead of merely describing their characters’ costumes, writers could suggest, more or less obliquely, how a character felt wearing and manipulating what he wore, how that affected his temper or behaviour, and how all this might affect other characters. Trollope, for example, has a man calling on a lady to propose marriage. Awkwardly, he ...”

“... In practice the personal monarch was just as susceptible to ego-massage as anyone else, if not more so, and a single counsellor could all too easily monopolise the royal affections and the royal ear, along with access to the rest of the royal person, and the royal purse. The fatal and perennial vulnerability of monarchy to this sort of abuse seems to have ...”

“... running gear (white shorts, sleeveless vest, bare feet in leather running shoes so thin they look more like ballet pumps), he’s down on his haunches, leaning forward, waiting for the starting gun. There are no competing runners nearby; he was obviously posing for the camera. But the photo isn’t a fake. Coppard was 23 at the time. For the previous eight ...”

“... that ‘soon’ express a wish or a regret? Does the narrator know? We are not going to hear much more from him, since he is only a page away from his last words. All he can really say about Albertine is ancient and obvious and rather beautiful: that he used to watch her sleep and that she is dead. ‘Profonde Albertine, que je voyais dormir et qui était ...”

“... the most penetrating and uncompromising thinker of the civil wars, authority’s friend Thomas Hobbes? The cast list remains dominated by Levellers and sects. Though Hill’s confrontational stance has yielded to scholarly circumspection, the category of radicalism continues to nourish, in Dmitri Levitin’s words, ‘the idea that critical or ...”

“... Caesar had begun to fray, but it cast a shadow over everything else. Cicero still won trials far more often than he lost them, but he lacked the will and the ability to trim his sails to each passing breeze. He still wanted to steer a middle course, to pursue the concordia ordinum – a harmony of the social orders – and not the extremism now embraced on ...”