“... how many of them were sustained by the potential of their work, by the realisation of the great powers for good they could exercise for the benefit of large numbers of people. Why else did Donald Macnabb, a district officer in the Punjab, build an irrigation canal with his own money? Why else did officials work in the famine and plague camps, burying ...”

“... they took too long to do things. The Prof and his team of young economists and statisticians had powers to override departmental norms, to extract instantly the information they wanted, and – which did not add to their popularity – to nose into areas where something seemed to be wrong; Churchill once referred to the branch as ‘my ...”

“... In Scotland, it was difficult to regard her as a stooge for the English, given her detestation of Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey, who had been an unwelcome escort to her new husband in 1503, and who went on to command the English army which in September 1513 shattered the Scottish elite and killed King James IV at Flodden. Later she continued to be eclectic in ...”

“... to limitless wealth and resources, technology promises not only observation, but the novelist’s powers of arrangement and retroactive shaping. Lemoine’s drones cast a roving eye over spaces and individuals from above. (‘You hold the figures in your hand,’ he tells Mira of his love of flying. ‘You can see the whole scene.’) His phone-hacking ...”

“... to be rid of something universally regarded as real and of this world. Belief in its therapeutic powers did not depend on blood’s supposedly magic or symbolic qualities but on its real life-giving force. When, in the 1750s, the people of Paris rioted because Louis XV’s henchmen were supposedly kidnapping children in order to cure his morally corrupt, and ...”

“... meant no judicial inquiry, no prosecution, and instead a Fatal Accident Inquiry with no powers to subpoena which declined to investigate how the bomb got on the plane for fear of interfering with police inquiries. As political players grow old, they reminisce and sometimes they forget what they are meant to have said or not said. Five years later ...”

“... What​ is identity politics? Is it, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, a part of society you don’t like that’s fighting for its interests as fiercely as yours does? Or is it, as Mark Lilla puts it in The Once and Future Liberal, ‘a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition’? The book belongs to the genre of responses to Donald Trump’s election in which liberal American academics turn their rage on their own intellectual-political class ...”

“... on the lab tests that the defeat devices were designed to defeat; for another, their enforcement powers were next to non-existent. Why? See above: Germany is Europe’s most powerful country, car manufacture is Germany’s most powerful industry. The worst that could happen, in the unlikely event that Volkswagen was caught, was a slap on the wrist and a ...”

“... decision for apparent bias, but that it was the four judicial conservatives, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito, who voted to uphold the judgment. They may also now know that, thanks to a subsequent Supreme Court ruling, Massey need no longer channel its subventions through its chairman: it can donate to judicial re-election campaigns corporately and ...”

“... she jumped out of a fourth-floor window. Her intention was either to die or to display her magical powers, depending on how delusional one thinks she was. Graves jumped after her from a lower window. Both survived – and Riding, despite broken vertebrae, was able to walk again through the intervention of a back surgeon called Mr Lake. Riding (never one to ...”

“... all this controversy, who in his Free Enquiry of 1749 had questioned the extension of miraculous powers into the second century on grounds which left it doubtful whether he believed they had existed in the days of the apostles. The real issue is latent here: Gibbon’s critics wanted him to concede – and thought he had not conceded – that the spread of ...”

“... They think of themselves as continuing the struggle against mystificatory nonsense that Thomas Huxley waged against Bishop Wilberforce, Russell against Bergson, and Carnap against Heidegger. These philosophers still award a special ontological status (‘fundamental reality’) to the elementary particles discovered by the physicists. They believe ...”

“... the top, tells of the Gulf of Tonkin incident and President Johnson’s request for war-making powers in Indo-China. The second headline, also right across the page in what must have been a tough day for sub-editors, reports the FBI’s discovery of three corpses, believed to be of three missing civil-rights workers, in a swamp in Mississippi. For me, and ...”

“... often you read them; it remains the incantation of a murderer, dishevelled and fumbling among the powers of darkness.It is an act of alert critical reading to spot the action word among the proliferating concepts; and generous to suggest that Macbeth, crazed and ambitious as he is, even as he contemplates the killing of his king, can still represent a more ...”

“... first met Johnson in 1763, in the back parlour of a bookshop. It belonged to a friend of Johnson, Thomas Davies, who described ‘his aweful approach … somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father’s ghost, “Look, my Lord, it comes.”’ ‘Remember me’ was Boswell’s mandate from ...”