“... him to prefer the quietest sort of ruin for the object of his affections’. The young lady, for her part, ‘saw through him, and had not the least intention of being seduced’. This is the kind of fun on the subject which Jane Austen had always enjoyed, and which probably cheered her last days. So far from the atmosphere of Sanditon being ...”

“... could have made her work vulnerable to disfavour. The handful of her poems recently printed in Roger Lonsdale’s 18th-Century Women Poets were very favourably received. In ‘Washing-Day’ the ‘domestic Muse’ abandons ‘Language of gods’ for gossip. In slip-shod measure loosely prattling on Of farm or orchard, pleasant curds and cream, Or ...”

“... whether for himself or itself is not always clear (at Béranger’s funeral, Baudelaire said to Roger de Beauvoir: ‘Make no mistake, I am in mourning for Les Fleurs du mal’). Perhaps only Baudelaire could have imagined coffins at the sound of logs being unloaded on a winter’s afternoon. He compared his heart to ‘chambres d’éternel deuil’ and ...”

“... associated with women at all levels, they also increase generally with age. To put it differently, young men are the least healthy eaters. Why is this? Do they have more cash to spend on junk food? Or is the macho British male still gripped by the traditional belief that quiche-eaters are wimps? As more and more schools attempt to wean their pupils onto ...”

“... idiotic and unnecessary tennis knick-knacks like T-shirts and caps, there’s the sullen crowd of young pros dressed as walking billboards for Hertz, Movado or Volvo rather than as tea-sipping athletes in white flannels. Even the commentators are pros (some of them, like Cliff Drysdale and John McEnroe, excellent ones). In nearly every way tennis has become ...”

“... se cherchent.’ They seek each other out – rather as power and authority seek each other, in Roger Scruton’s formulation, to create our own political establishment. Mr Bony, so Naipaul was told, had been accused of plotting against the President and had spent five years as a political prisoner before being pardoned. The President, who is over ...”

“... fall guy by the political establishment in the scare over the radical movement of 1792-4. He was a young advocate out on a limb, for his family background was not landowning. He was overconfident, indiscreet, and for a lawyer surprisingly unaware of the current mechanisms of suppression. This life shows that even given the repressive climate of 1794 and the ...”

“... in general in the period following the great revolutionary awakening of 1848, one can imagine the young Korzeniowski seeking some serenity in the form of an attempt to escape politics altogether. That is exactly what he did. Figuratively (though it is a figure that would be literally dramatised again and again in his writings), he jumped ship. At the age of ...”

“... and ‘walking through walls’ may have been successful against poorly armed, untrained young Palestinian guerrillas in a small refugee camp under total siege, but when the same Israeli units faced the stronger, better armed and better trained Hizbullah fighters in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, things were very different. In operational ...”

“... after he has dug his grave, refusing to move into the immaterial. Concerning Vesalius’ series, Roger Caillois remarked in his essay ‘Au coeur du Fantastique’ that ‘more genuine mystery crops up in such documents, in which precision is of the essence, than in the wildest inventions of Hieronymus Bosch.’ In the dissection groups, imagination was ...”

“... ambiguity as well as ambition, 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 ...”

“... reality,’ one that is ‘far more permanent than the physical reality that surrounds us’. Roger Penrose, another unabashed Platonist, holds that the natural world is only a ‘shadow’ of a realm of eternal mathematical forms. The rationale for this otherwordly view appeared first in the Republic. Geometers, Plato observed, talk of perfectly round ...”

“... of children’s literature seemed unassailable. The latest adventures of John, Susan, Titty and Roger could safely be placed in the hands of the most impressionable child, and placed they were by wholesome parents every Christmas holidays between 1930 and 1943: Swallows and Amazons, Coot Club, We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, every one a bestseller to be ...”

“... sedition: Sam’s coffee house was the base of the royalist journalist and official press censor Roger L’Estrange, who described it as a place ‘where a company of honest fellows meet to confound the lyes of a caball of shamming whigs’. And, while coffee houses collectively might indeed be public places with heterogeneous clienteles, each had its own ...”

“... only part of their wider investigation into the workings of nature. The 13th-century philosopher Roger Bacon thought that alchemy would help humans prolong their lives and prepare for the Apocalypse. Besides, the alchemist’s claim that angels rather than demons guided his work was sincere. Why, in a world teeming with supernatural forces, should this be ...”