“... or flagrantly unreliable evidence. Her end is predictably murky. Octavian, so the cynical say, may well have publicly paraded his disappointment at Cleopatra’s premature end, but surely he had enough guards and thugs at his disposal to have prevented her death had he really wanted to. You don’t need to go so far as to argue – and Chauveau does ...”

“... with those of Queens or the Bronx) and hence its unequal distribution of resources. Manhattan may well be the world’s great cultural centre, yet few of the artists and intellectuals whose work animates it can afford to live there, and Bender says little about the effects of that. New Yorkers in search of cultural innovation are more likely to find it in ...”

“... military have real power over policy-making, even in matters of war. General Tommy Franks may have regarded Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense, as ‘the stupidest fucking guy on the planet’, but he took Feith’s orders, and those of the civilians standing behind him: Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the president himself. Their ...”

“... on a map? No doubt financial constraints were the main cause of this information blackout, but it may also have seemed excusable because of our uncertainty about what sort of thing a translation of a poem is: how much, and what, we need to know in order to make sense of it. Translation necessarily cuts poems loose from their origins: it carries them not only ...”

“... if the staphylococcus gets into a bone it can be out of antibiotic reach and amputation may be the only remedy.The nature of the anti-staphylococcal immune response explains why there are no successful vaccines. Enthusiasm for them in the 1920s and 1930s was a result of the rhetorical skills of Alexander Fleming’s boss at St Mary’s Hospital, Sir ...”

“... person) as ‘indefinable … which he believes in a lively manner gives him ideas of whatever may be going forward externally’ – promoted in him ‘an almost irresistible inclination to visit different parts of his native country, in quest of knowledge or amusement’. At 26 he was not ready to pray away the rest of his life, to say nothing of ...”

“... were cordoned off in separate, inferior waiting rooms in bus terminals and train stations. On 4 May, a group of 18 activists, black and white, men and women, all members of CORE, ventured south from Washington, heading to New Orleans. Their journey, dubbed the ‘Freedom Ride’, took them through the upper South, where their affront to Jim Crow was mostly ...”

“... is free to shed its urgency. In defining Critical Condition as a protest against the present, I may be making the book sound more coherent than it is. Technically, it isn’t a book, but a collection of eight essays, four of which have been previously published. Gubar herself claims that ‘there is no plot to the book,’ but she is too modest: if you like ...”

“... Thing. Well, not quite, for what he really opposed was what Blake called ‘single vision’: ‘May God us keep/From Single vision – Newton’s sleep.’ Which can only encourage a belief in Feyerabend’s anti-scientism. His most widely known book, Against Method (1975), was intended to be one of a pair of books, the other written by Imre Lakatos, who ...”

“... Elton . . . pioneered the practice of microhistory’ in his Star Chamber Stories (1958). Elton may have been a great historian; he certainly dominated the study of Tudor history through the 1960s and 1970s. But it would have been hard to find anyone more hostile to the new social sciences, or to French theory, and Cressy knows full well that Elton would ...”

“... Johnson’s speech all over the place, making his hero clearer, making him morally stronger. There may be no reason for us to fuss over this, but it does raise questions about Boswell’s method: are his alterations the work of memory, or are they choices in aid of invention?On Saturday [1 May] ...”

“... about God and the world; hence he adopts an attitude to authority which is bifold – authorities may tell us truths which we cannot ourselves apprehend, or they may hoodwink us with nonsense. Therefore on some points authorities must be trusted even if one experiences their absurdity; on others they might be compared with ...”

“... and no wonder – while men postpone commitment, her eggs are already scrambling. The young mother may be advised to give up work till her children are older or she may be urged to fight for government policies and workplace changes that would enable her more easily to combine both roles. But basically the books all give the ...”

“... Greg Lindsay alone. Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s business school, may be a peculiar sort of Johnson, but Lindsay, a business journalist, is nonetheless his committed Boswell. A Boswell who, in search of his subject’s zeitgeist wisdom, once mounted a three-week exploration of ‘Airworld’ – as Kasarda calls it – by ...”

“... locals don’t love them. They’re convinced that they are members of the tribe. Their confusion may issue from Silicon Valley’s own favourite stories about itself. These days in TED talks and tech-world conversation, commerce is described as art and as revolution and huge corporations are portrayed as agents of the counterculture. That ...”