“... one month and I was not able to read the third. I also read some Eurocommunist writings, books by Roger Garaudy, Cohen’s biography of Bukharin and some copies of New Left Review. R.B.: Why do these questions of Soviet history loom so large in contemporary life? B.K.: In the West things happen very quickly. Before Thatcher or Reagan seems a long time ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... fashioned a Faraday with unswerving theoretical conceptions of the world derived ultimately from Roger Joseph Boscovich, a Jesuit natural philosopher of the 18th century who had described the workings of nature not in terms of material atoms but of attractive and repulsive forces emanating from non-material centres. In an age of concern about the public ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Further, as Russell recalled in his autobiography, ‘I was thought wicked for saying that very young infants should not be punished for masturbation. A typical American witch hunt was instituted against me, and I became taboo throughout the whole of the United States.’ His planned lecture tour collapsed, and no magazine or newspaper would publish ...”

“... non-repeating five-sided shapes that violated the known laws of crystallography (that is, until Roger Penrose in the 20th century found the secret).It is this geometry as well as the mathematical knowledge that pertains to it that we discover, if we lean in closer – in imagination or reality – to the surfaces of the walls and arches and pavements and ...”

“... vanquishes her pupil by giving him false, irresistible confidence in his own abilities. Roger Lonsdale identified a similar dynamic in Johnson’s sometimes disturbingly fierce reactions to the ‘seductive powers of eloquence’ and ‘overpowering pleasure’ of poetry. Documenting those responses while seeking to reframe them in general ...”

“... 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 ...”