“... John Maynard Keynes, grandson of the minister of the Bunyan chapel at Bedford, was born into a religious tradition that for two hundred years had stopped its ears against the blandishments of Mr Worldly Wiseman and sought only the Celestial City of Eternal Life. The City was to be found, as all readers of Pilgrim’s Progress knew, not by piety or public-spiritedness or good works or moral behaviour, but by that indefinable state of inner consciousness known as Salvation by Faith ...”

“... and that Bosie was rumoured to have taken to an eyeglass, after reading the case of a Major Parkinson who cut his throat with a bit of glass in a Holloway cell. Max’s was a tough, unsentimental world, but could combine both feeling and elegance with toughness. If Max really was leading a double life – a pleasurable but hardly tenable ...”

“... is the most commonly recorded reaction. (Ironically, cooling the new generation of electrics is a major technical problem: Ford’s ‘Ecostar’ prototype, with which it had hoped to beat EV1 to market, burned up when its advanced-technology sodium sulphur batteries spontaneously combusted in 1994.) Electrics are still suffering from the problems which ...”

“... If it had not innovated, there would certainly have been a government-promoted Plan for Coal. No major industry could be allowed to languish. But, as Michael Flinn points out, it was not with the actual process of mining that 18th-century government concerned itself, but with the trading of the product. The coastwise traffic in coal was the largest activity ...”

“... the cops had in December consulted a New York psychiatrist called James Brussel, described by John Douglas as ‘the father of behavioural profiling’. Douglas is the FBI man who inspired Thomas Harris to invent the character Jack Crawford in the Hannibal Lecter novels, so he should know. This is the psychological portrait Brussel came up with of the Mad ...”

“... polite: this table-rapping, spirit-summoning Rosicrucian was a lot sillier than most of us. Few major modern writers have been, in terms of their intellectual interests, so completely off the wall. But Yeats was one of the last great self-fashioners, and it is never quite possible to know how far he credited his own scrupulously cultivated absurdities, or ...”

“... system. Clark appeals to those who like their art easy, Wind to those who want it difficult. A major factor in Clark’s success was that he wrote about works of art which his readers knew to be outstanding even if they could not always say why. This is particularly evident in his famous television series Civilisation. The title gives the impression that ...”

“... the story of its last two years, as witnessed by Brendan Archer, referred to throughout as ‘the Major’, a blinkered but liberal-minded Englishman of independent means made passive, bitter and melancholy by his experiences in the trenches. In 1919 he arrives at the Majestic as the fiancé of Angela Spencer, the eldest daughter of the hotel’s widowed ...”

“... of biology. It is characteristic of something which, for me, and clearly for Gould, is one of the major attractions of biology: the bringing together of particular fact and general theory. Darwin made it possible for us to see nature simultaneously with the eyes of a child and of a philosopher. The book is full of such examples. What deep lessons would you ...”

“... war crimes in occupied countries should be returned to those countries for trial. But what of the major war criminals whose crimes were not associated with a particular place? That they should be proceeded against internationally was agreed, but not how. From 1942, according to the Tusas, the British Government and bureaucracy had concluded (the Lord ...”

“... as they will – they find themselves in the happy position of not having to cope with a major predator. This little tale about the consequences of ignoring systemic interconnectedness – what Henry Kissinger used to call ‘linkage’ – is laughably simple. Yet it is acted out every year in countless vegetable plots and allotments all over the ...”

“... German Nazi, an Egyptian Bedouin, a born ruler’) is tracked by a dogged Englishman, a low-caste major from a working-class background. A beautiful Jewess allies herself with the Englishman and risks her life and her virtue for the cause. Abducted into the desert, it is she who destroys Wolff. At the end of the novel girl and spy-catcher marry. These ...”

“... of an early ABCA lecture to an RAMC unit stationed in Durham, with a ‘varsity’-type major doling out a ‘poor rehash’ of a War Office text on the War in the Desert and strictly excluding any discussion of the Russian Front, where the fate of the war was actually being decided; ‘urgent discussion’ of the forthcoming general election in a ...”

“... Hands up who knows that a major source of Tea Party ideological fervour is a long-forgotten 19th-century French economist – French no less (it wasn’t so long ago that John Kerry was derided for being ‘a bit French’). Indeed, hands up who has even heard of Frédéric Bastiat ...”

“... to which I was deeply attached, and which I had named, but a day or two previously, after the major prophet Isaiah’. That use of ‘major’ speaks volumes. Twenty years ago, Burgess persuaded Heinemann to bring out a new edition, and in the process discovered that the author was Dr Bashford, a Post Office medical ...”