“... he was also strongly partisan; on occasions, he came close to ‘going native’, in the manner of John Reed with the Red Guards in Petrograd. His journalism always threatened to tip over into a more direct, military involvement – until he finally became, and died, a soldier. A South African born into a liberal, newspaper-owning family in the Eastern ...”

“... our knowledge of Nature is always socially mediated. This is one of several issues which divide John Rees, who has written an erudite, illuminating introduction to this book, and Slavoj Žižek, who has provided a characteristically provocative ‘postface’ for it. Roughly speaking, Rees seeks rather stiffly to reclaim Lukács for a certain Marxist ...”

“... will be no one but soldiers and bandits. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ John Bagot Glubb, a young lieutenant bearing wounds from the war in France, arrived in Mesopotamia in 1920. His assignment was to command armed patrols through the desert of what would become, under its first Western occupier, Iraq. The British bureaucracy, he ...”

“... then registers his many failures to honour those vows. He notes benefits given and received (‘I took Mr Townsend and Isackson to the next door, a tavern, and did spend 5s on them’), and is sensitive to imbalances between the two. Affairs of the heart are not isolated from the reciprocal rhythms of receipt and payment: the day after Diana Crisp ‘denied ...”

“... the street: ‘There goes the man that writ a book that neither he nor anyone else understands.’ John Locke, then a political refugee in the Netherlands, simply couldn’t master the mathematics, though this didn’t stop him reviewing the book in the Dutch press. He was glad to be reassured by a local expert that he could take the sums and proofs on ...”

“... microscope, he carved and painted sculptures measurable in microns and millimetres; his Pope John Paul IIholds a cross crafted from a hair divided into sixths, making its width slightly less than the diameter of two red blood cells. His portrait of Little Red Riding Hood, whose diminutive has never been so well-deserved, features a mere speck of a girl ...”

“... two heroes stand marooned in their Beatness on that sunlit hill, ‘a devilish look, and he never took his eyes off mine for a long time. I looked back and blushed ... we would stick together and be buddies till we died.’ Spelling out the significance of this for the legend, Campbell notes that ‘theirs is a platonic love, though bedecked by romantic ...”

“... It takes a special man to resist Hilda von Einem. A German spy in John Buchan’s Greenmantle (1916), she is a ‘known man-eater’, who tries to inspire a rising of ‘Muslim hordes’ against the British Empire. ‘With her bright hair and the long exquisite oval of her face she looked like some destroying fury of a Norse legend ...”

“... with a premium on stealth as well as wealth. When Nigel, nephew of Roger, bishop of Salisbury, took on the job in 1126 (or thereabouts) he was simply called ‘the treasurer’. He resigned when made bishop of Ely in 1133 – not the sort of career progression to be expected these days. But the bishop of Salisbury, versatile in his nepotism, happily had ...”

“... proved attractive to the Latin American countries in its sphere of influence. Britain and France took a different path. They repudiated Montesquieu and concentrated power in a single elected assembly, rejecting constitutional review by a supreme court and subordinating presidents and second chambers to cabinet rule, with the support of the House of Commons ...”

“... the Cravens ‘were our near neighbours, and old acquaintances, and they were gentlemen.’ She took the name of Wilson (quite why is still not clear) and from then on life was a succession of lovers. At least, according to Wilson it was a succession: her biographer more plausibly suggests a certain amount of overlap. She was not, as Woolf wrote, ‘always ...”

“... more mocking posture, in another century and in another country, assumed by the American president John Adams: “It will never be pretended that any person employed . . . had interviews with the gods, or was in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven.”’ Wittreich spends the rest of the paragraph glossing Adams, and then moves on. Notice how his ...”

“... best and wittiest voice. There was puzzlement about the problematic outliers: Ruth, which took the side of a seduced girl and her illegitimate child, and Sylvia’s Lovers, a historical novel dealing with the press gangs of the Napoleonic Wars. No one paid much attention to Gaskell’s steady production of sketches, tales and novellas for such ...”

“... the Rivonia trial began in November 1963 was so poisonous that Joel Joffe, then a young lawyer, took the case on only because he had already decided to emigrate. Two years later, he wrote up his lively insider’s view of the trial and allowed Lionel Bernstein, the only defendant to get off, to rewrite it to the point of virtual co-authorship. It was ...”

“... in 1733. Emergency midwives studied Chamberlen’s book, tore out the engravings of forceps and took them to instrument-makers. It seemed that craniotomies might become a thing of the past. One midwife, William Smellie, called forceps ‘artificial hands’, a cyborg technology that allowed male midwives to transcend gender and the impropriety of touching a ...”