“... wife, Hedli, ‘my trouble all my life … has been over-production.’ That vast output of books may be one reason it’s taken a while to see how good a lot of the poetry actually is. He tried out styles obsessively, used any device you can think of, and in content embraced pretty much everything from the jazz and stockings and Johnnie Walker of Autumn ...”

“... stuff of Shakespeare’, but that surely is letting everyone concerned off far too lightly. He may just be a smooth-talking thug, and many online observers have noted that he seems to model himself on the smooth-talking thug and would-be businessman Stringer Bell from The Wire. But the word that best captures Saif Gaddafi comes from Nicholas Shaxson’s ...”

“... Quite early one May morning, in the last days of a subarctic winter, I strayed from a marked trail I had been walking for just under two hours and discovered I was lost in the north Norwegian tundra. It was something that never should have happened: 99 times out of a hundred, I am a sensible, even cautious wanderer, but that morning, in an odd mood I couldn’t explain other than to say, lamely, that I was sorry to be leaving Finnmark, I had left the borrowed lakeside cabin where I’d been staying and decided to go for one last walk along a not at all hazardous eight-mile trail about thirty miles east of Kautokeino ...”

“... most thundering passages: For as to this question in hand, what the people by their just right may do in change of government or of governor . . . surely they that shall boast, as we do, to be a free nation, and not have in themselves the power to remove or to abolish any governor supreme or subordinate, with the government itself upon urgent ...”

“... of abroad, he was reading Freud and writing short stories. The seeds of his science fiction may have been sown in wartime Shanghai, but they germinated in postwar England. His early adult life could almost be a blueprint for the struggling young writer of the mid-20th century: two years of reading medicine at Cambridge before dropping out and going to ...”

“... senior police officers and lawyers. Its job is to re-examine cases where a miscarriage of justice may have occurred: it handles cases after the appeal process has been exhausted, and if it finds evidence that a miscarriage of justice may have taken place it refers the case to the High Court to be heard again. Al-Megrahi ...”

“... cases have had a different type, MM. There is evidence from other kinds of CJD that this variant may predispose people to develop TSEs. It may be, however, that the main effect of MM is only to shorten the incubation period. Estimates of the eventual size of the vCJD epidemic have to take this into account – are we all ...”

“... Those who would measure the timetable for Saddam’s atomic programme in years may be seriously underestimating the situation and the gravity of the threat. George Bush, November 1990 He tried [12 years ago] to develop a programme – an upgraded Oak Ridge [enrichment] facility in Iraq. Of course he couldn’t. It is too complex for Iraqi science or technology ...”

“... astronomy and mathematics was sufficiently advanced that, by the first millennium BC, they may have been able to predict eclipses of the moon (which is not to say that their astronomy wasn’t for the most part developed in service of celestial divination). Babylonian astrology/astronomy (the two cannot be separated) was communicated to Hellenistic ...”

“... family have been in prison.’ But he also experienced different ways of thinking. Belfast may not have been at the heart of the summer of love in 1967, and as a practising Catholic Adams didn’t have much in common with progressive contemporaries in London and Dublin, but his early life did at least expose him to Northern Ireland’s Unionist ...”

“... event, the strangling of Hélène Rytmann is a pure contingency, for which motives may be and are found but no one sovereign motive that might resolve and classify the crime as the understandable dénouement of a long and tortured relationship. Between motives and act Althusser preserves that enigmatic gap beloved of the Existentialists of ...”

“... sense’. The notions it deals with – ‘courage’ and ‘compassion’, for example – may be abstract, but they are not inert: they can provoke acts of violence or heroic self-sacrifice. From a philosophical point of view, the practical power of moral concepts has always been a bit of a mystery. Plato attributed it to the intrinsic attraction of ...”

“... the resolutions so badly drafted that there was a tremendous row when it came to settling on 1 May as International Workers’ Day. Yet at the end there was a tremendous cheer for the symbolic handshake between Liebknecht and Edouard Vaillant, representing the unity of the French and German proletariats against militarism and war. Lafargue was one of the ...”

“... individualism to an imperial appetite and the project of continental expansion. Turner’s insight may sound like common sense: once the last frontier has closed, Americans will have to teach themselves how to live, and at just that point the New World will cease to be new. But we have never come to that point, says Fisher. He is pretty sure we never will. And ...”

“... pages, of which only the first 93 have previously been printed. Lawrence wrote the book between May 1920, when he had just finished The Lost Girl, and some time in 1921. He gave up working on Mr Noon in order to dash off the travel book Sea and Sardinia, and was at the same time writing Aaron’s Rod. He had trouble finishing both the novels: Aaron’s Rod ...”