“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... before. For the most radical among them, ‘the poorest he that is in England’, in Thomas Rainsborough’s famous phrase, had the same rights as the greatest. This is not to say that the Levellers were united in their commitment to a democratic franchise. Certain categories of men would have been excluded from the start (and women excluded ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Comyns’s work, as do children who are neglected, abused, endowed with supernatural powers, disruptive, imaginative and periodically violent. ‘See stars, Mummy,’ Sandro says before hitting Sophia over the head with an iron bar. It is this intertwining of fact and fiction, realism and surrealism, that gives Comyns’s work its power. Six of ...”

“... a phony. Taylor, we’re told, also stole Johnson’s idea that the decisive moment for the Axis powers was Hitler’s decision to declare war on the US: Johnson had confided it to Taylor over supper in hall. Over another supper six months later, he served it up to Johnson as though it was a novel notion; and then he stuck it in a book without ...”

“... Mind (1952), through The Artist’s Journey into the Interior (1965) and the studies of Thomas Mann (1958) and Kafka (1974), to the reviews, essays and lectures now collected as In the Age of Prose, his task has been to make the major achievements of 19th and 20th-century German culture understandable by a British and North American readership. He ...”

“... Humble Petition and Advice of 1657 attempted to modify but not to cripple the Protector’s powers), purported to divide supreme power between the Protector and ‘the people assembled in Parliament’, but in reality there was an unmistakable bias against ‘overmighty’ Parliaments, such as the Rump which had just been sent packing. The Protector had ...”

“... is confounding by design, as it was with his fellow countryman, contemporary and sometimes rival, Thomas Bernhard, and as it was with one of his finest critics, W.G. Sebald. In Essay on the Jukebox, the second volume in the series Handke has recently finished, he, or a narrator quite like him, tells of how, in writing, he moved a cypress he’d seen in ...”

“... of English border castles and towers. In Northumberland, James awaited the English army, led by Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey. Though apparently possessing advantages in ground, equipment and supplies, James allowed himself to be outmanoeuvred by Surrey, who cut off the Scottish army’s route north, forcing it to move to Branxton Hill, where its cannon ...”

“... enjoyed Indian careers of their own, and his eldest daughter, Charlotte, married the son of Sir Thomas Metcalfe, the British resident at Delhi. Mount has always been intrigued by cliques, elites and who knows who. The Shakespears were connected to the Thackerays (Augusta was the novelist’s cousin), and with the Metcalfes also thrown in, Mount is able to ...”