“... with it, would be a new way of getting under the skin of things.’ While such an undertaking may seem bizarre, a feeling for water is fundamental as well as easily overlooked: we came from it, we are largely made of it, it is as likely as not that wars will presently be fought over it, and rising sea levels, thanks to global warming, ...”

“... when he died – you can hang on to the crucifixion – or turning 40. Take your pick. OK, there may have been a donkey, but that just means the story was not a fiction but a drama enacted according to the script the prophets had written; and his mother was a married woman not a parthenos – a married parthenos is a contradiction in terms. What’s ...”

“... rewards and punishments, the hope of heaven and the threat of hell, to be effective. ‘Virtue may owe her panegyrics to morality, but must derive her authority from religion.’ This analysis is a particular application of a more general principle. Johnson believed that all human effort springs from the elementary passions of avoiding pain and seeking ...”

“... so that (like Imlac crossing deserts and mountains for ‘images and resemblances’) he may draw if he wishes on a language of atoms, anti-matter and black holes – but not, like Empson in ‘Doctrinal Point’, to cite individual physicists such as Heviside and Eddington. We may ask for ‘scientific ...”

“... he know what he has said. It is also true, and for the same reason, that what the poet has said may be taken in many different ways by his readers. Blake would have agreed with Shelley’s note about God at the end of ‘Queen Mab’, that ‘the works of His fingers have borne witness against Him.’ In whatever spirit of humility a great poet undertakes ...”

“... are there to be drawn. The first, though Hersh never quite says it, is that the Presidency itself may have a flaw, a flaw made worse when the incumbent is a Nixon: its power is monarchical. The President of the United States is the executive. His power rests on a piece of parchment drawn up when Catherine the Great was Empress of All the Russias and George ...”

“... was uncharacteristically backward in dishing out his unfashionable medicine: ‘Cecil Parkinson may have broken one of the Ten Commandments. He has also been foolish. But there has been nothing vicious in his behaviour. He has been involved in a human drama, now a human tragedy, almost banal in its ordinariness.’ The Telegraph thought that ‘the public ...”

“... looked down on them. Lord Lambton’s heroines are of the same flesh as us, though their blood may be bluer. Maria Luisa Bombal specialises in the portrayal of another kind of aristocratic heroine, commuting between the labyrinthine South American cities and dense, tropical landscapes which secrete occasional, decaying estates, taking refuge from the ...”

“... an ideology, followed by his loyal, harlequin-like Russian adherent ... This stimulating fantasy may be useful for Hakim’s education, perhaps. The idea about self-styled ‘people’s parties’, Nazi or Communist, echoes a quotation from Mussolini’s theorist, Argento Soffici, which appears as one of the 20 epigraphs to the chapters. At Edenvale, outside ...”

“... On 10 May 1933 an undergraduate at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, wrote in her diary a description of the clothes she was wearing on that sultry summer’s day. The description includes the phrase blue celanese trollies. The diary entry in question was not published until 1984, by which time the diarist, Barbara Pym, had become a cult figure in English literary circles ...”

“... instance, in his comment on the ‘Nika riot’ of AD 532: ‘That ... is the sort of price that may have to be paid for the total suppression of proper democratic rights.’ Compare also his remarks on the population of Rome in the late Republic: ‘If indeed they were to some extent demoralised and depraved, it was largely because the oligarchy had made it ...”

“... the prejudice of which is precisely to value structures at the expense of substances, and which may therefore overestimate their explanatory value. Indeed, the question is not so much to know whether there is or is not a system of relations in a particular object of research, since such systems are everywhere, but to determine the relative importance of ...”

“... be impossible in the first place. Dreyfus and Rabinow are aware of these difficulties, and it may have been at their instigation that Foucault wrote the section of the ‘Afterword’ entitled ‘How is power exercised?’ On my own reading of that essay, Foucault defends himself against the common charges of political conservatism, moral nihilism and ...”

“... out during the past winter 107 times! When I come home you will think me a sad barbarian – I may not even, just at first, appreciate your fine points. The style of that is enough to suggest the kind of talk he did like when he could find it – not everyone’s idea of the natural. The ‘best talker, in a certain way’, that he had met in England was ...”

“... talks with former law clerks about the Justices and with the Justices about each other. The book may have permanently changed the relationship between the clerks and the Justices. These clerks are outstanding recent graduates of prominent law schools who are selected to serve as assistants to Supreme Court Justices for a year. The Justices, by ...”