“... If you are willing to define what you mean by it, the idea of progress in the arts is useful. Take Titian’s portraits. Whether or not those who first saw them understood that a new way of recording likeness was evolving, that way would define the technical ambitions of European portrait painting until photography put an end to them ...”

“... this fuss about cooks and chefs? The how-to-cook sections of bookshops are as big as the how-to-be-successful-in-life sections; it’s no longer clear where one ends and the other begins. Many of the books sell themselves not so much as sources of practical information – how to make a wild mushroom risotto – but as windows onto both the skills and the ...”

“... each time. But Moore now commanded great respect in the black community, and many were shocked by his arrest. A giant man, heavy, broad and tall, he appeared imperturbable and unimpeachable – and yet he was Coleman’s prize, the alleged kingpin of Tulia’s drug trade. Another of those arrested was Donnie Smith. Charismatic, a former star athlete, he ...”

“... the public imagination, supposedly demonstrating that there are absolute limits to what can be known. More specifically, it is thought to tell us that there are mathematical truths which can never be proved. These are among the misconceptions that proliferate around Gödel’s theorem and its ...”

“... of West Africa, the Philippines, and regions of India and Japan. It was the most powerful and by far the richest empire the world had ever seen. ‘How strange a thing it is,’ one English observer reflected in 1609, ‘that all the states of Europe have been asleep so long that for a hundred years and more the wealth of riches of the East and West ...”

“... that the man on the line was trying to patch up his marriage, and the task wasn’t going to be quick or easy. ‘You just aren’t going to let us get back together, are you?’ he said in a tone at once supplicating and truculent. I thought that maybe she had her reasons and wondered how far away she was on the other end of the line. At Lee ...”

“... number of the literary critics dwelled on the fear of tyranny that was voiced in (and around) 1614 by poets and historians, an anxiety given focus by the breakdown of the short-lived Parliament that was called in the spring and by the imprisonment of the Crown’s principal critics within ...”

“... intimidating dance, performed before each game in front of the opposition, and sometimes met by an unconvincing couldn’t-care-less huddle. In the event the French faced it out. The ‘haka’, Twickenham, 1954 The New Zealanders handled the countdown with more aggression and a lot more self-importance. The selector, John Hart, on their arrival in ...”

“... Richardson’s William James, the most recent in a long run of biographies. Its predecessors were by Ralph Barton Perry (1935), Gay Wilson Allen (1967) and Linda Simon (1998). There are also fine portraits in Jean Strouse’s biography of Alice James (1980) and in Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club (2001). No lack of attention, then, but Richardson’s book ...”

“... Woolf thought of Milton as the ‘first of the masculinists’, a judgment since echoed by many. Eliot blamed him for the ‘dissociation of sensibility’; Pound deplored ‘his asinine bigotry, his beastly hebraism, the coarseness of his mentality’. More widespread these days is the belief, common among those who encounter Milton as required ...”

“... in many joint Jewish-Palestinian projects. At my interview the boss asked how I could possibly be objective. I had spent too much time with Palestinians; I was bound to be biased in their favour. I didn’t get the job. My next interview was with Walla, Israel’s most popular website. This time I did get the job and I ...”

“... idea being that if more power was given to the proles, the nation’s lampposts would immediately be festooned with lynched paedophiles. And the answer to that, in turn, is: ‘What about Iraq?’ A system without a democratic deficit would never have gone to war, and would certainly not have gone to war with the two main political ...”

“... a man in Royal Flying Corps uniform presented himself at the gates of the Kremlin, claiming to be the personal emissary of the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, and demanding an audience with Lenin. He was persuasive enough to be let in and managed to talk his way as far as ...”

“... they watched Moshe marching with his fellow trade unionists on Labour Day. Tzipke was terrified by the sight of mounted police: ‘It’s the Cossacks! The Cossacks are coming!’ But Golda was struck by the fact that the ‘police on horseback were escorting the marchers instead of dispersing them and trampling them ...”

“... my head. The wedding invitation had urged us to wear modest clothing because the Eucharist would be present. It was for the Eucharist, then, that I was wrestling a thick anti-intercourse pair of tights up towards my waist. ‘I had a lot of imagination and I entrapped you. You should be eternally grateful I didn’t give ...”