“... only apparent. Doing nothing – the lifelong ambition of Beckett’s characters, for example – may well be better than doing something, and is often philosophically more interesting. But being nobody cannot be a consummation to be wished. And before the bite there is a fine comic pathos in the sight of this invisible and unretainable man, a picture of a ...”

“... The clinical language used to describe the loss of pulse when the heart fails is not subtle. There may be ‘rapid haemodynamic deterioration’: the blood stops moving around the body. Presentation is with ‘dyspnoea, syncope or pain in the praecordium’ (the patient gasps for breath and collapses, feeling as if their chest is being torn apart). Many people ...”

“... we can imagine them holding their conversational own, over the capons and teal. What changed on 4 May 1557 was incorporation: a charter endorsed by Philip and Mary granted the Stationers a nationwide monopoly on printing, and the right to seize, burn or amend illegal books; to buy and sell property; to bring lawsuits in court; to gather whenever they ...”

“... see, what we have to deduce: Every landscape offers, at first glance, an immense disorder which may be sorted out howsoever we please. We may sketch out the history of its cultivation, plot the accidents of geography which have befallen it, and ponder the ups and downs of history and prehistory: but the most august of ...”

“... evolution but also has, as Nagel says, an ‘idealist’ character. Teleological principles may have moved the universe towards some kind of goal or fulfilment, and a glimmer of mentality may permeate even basic physical processes. For Nagel it is true in a more global way, a wholesale way, that ‘each of our lives ...”

“... argue that good novels depend on being able to dramatise what people don’t know: the author may know things, and so may the reader, but people not knowing things is always more interesting than what they know. In a good novel facts will seem incidental. Tolstoy gives us a picture of life on the Napoleonic battlefield ...”

“... which they also fiercely defy, and they look back so insistently to her earlier work that they may not seem designed to stand up on their own. How did Rich get to this point? She was a Radcliffe undergraduate when Auden picked A Change of World for the Yale Younger Poets prize in 1951; that book and The Diamond Cutters (1955) demonstrate an elegant if all ...”

“... of the behavioural constraints imposed upon us whenever we leave the privacy of our homes – we may come to expect that certain places and occasions will require scrupulous truth-telling.’ It’s endearing that he takes this fantasy – in which a bright line separates truth from lies and a remote brainscan can isolate and evaluate precise propositions ...”

“... documents are torn, pitted and worm-eaten. Abruptly, right in the middle of a word, the text may just break off. Modern science offers some help: the binocular microscope, infrared light, the digital scanner and multispectral imaging have all been used to sharpen abraded or worn ink. Even so, making sense of the straggling columns of blotched and broken ...”

“... first conferred on her by a mad millenarian back in England in 1795 (when she was 19), and which may have fed into her messianic fantasies later on. In her defence, it is worth pointing out that she wasn’t blind – or not all the time – to the fact that these might be delusory. But, as she wrote to Meryon in 1818, ‘Here without any stir on my own ...”

“... and ‘tragic’ mysteries of passion, but rather passion as a form of self-importance. God may be dead or dying but passion is not; and passion is now the Great Dictator. This, of course, makes Márai rather more of a writer of his time, a writer wary of the rhetoric of the self-aggrandising. For him the idea of an individual or a nation having a ...”

“... exploited by grizzled old men for their own purposes. Plausible evolutionary explanations for this may be offered in terms of the value of aggression in spreading one’s genes. Outsiders tend to think that a great many such explanations have at most a specious plausibility. Atran has a healthy scepticism, and speaks of just-so stories. An explanation is no ...”

“... The main title of this collection may at first seem wantonly non-descriptive, but it turns out to be exact. The first thing to see to if you want to write well is to avoid doing bad writing, used thinking. The more positive requirements can be left till later, if only a little later. Clichés are infallible symptoms of used thinking ...”

“... a Lord Chief Justice in 1676, since when blasphemy has been an offence in common law; the sanction may be asleep but it is not dead. If tempted to believe that it is, one needs to recall the 1976 prosecution of Gay News and the subsequent failure in the House of Lords of an attempt to get rid of it. I’m not sure whether to believe it, but am told it is even ...”

“... and subsidised housing. George Hogarth, a journalist, went to hear the Cyfarthfa band and wrote in May 1850, in Dickens’s Household Words, that he was astonished at their proficiency . . . I heard them perform the overture to Zampa, the Caliph of Baghdad, and Fra Diavolo, Vivi tu and some concerto music from Roberto, Don Giovanni and Lucia, with a ...”