“... strictly Darwinian account of terrestrial evolution they can assert that however alien life-forms may turn out to look, there is virtually no possibility that they will resemble Homo sapiens. We can forget humanoids such as Mr Spock and the Klingons because Homo evolved under a uniquely changing series of terran conditions. What is more, even if evolution ...”

“... be dialogical: we must aim to achieve consensus through debate and conversation with others who may have adopted interpretations different from our own. We must therefore not only give weight to our fellow citizens’ views in the decision-making process, but also construct a political and social system that delivers the conditions without which they could ...”

“... it is, the less certain the outcome. The accuser can end up all but in the dock; the accused may walk away from a true bill. Churchill, well aware of this, wanted the Nazi leaders, when they were finally captured, to be taken out and shot. Roosevelt initially agreed. It was Stalin, who had found that trials could be exceedingly satisfactory in both ...”

“... with thought-patterns predicated on notions of order, balance and discipline. His behaviour may seem self-pitying and his demeanour lumbering, but he is fundamentally a decent person and very rarely a dishonest one, as the evidence collected here demonstrates. The pomposity of his addresses to the mirror may grate on ...”

“... trauma, but with the psychic and ideological function that remembering the event still fulfils. I may well be a bad judge of what that function is; but my sense is that the narrative was not only a useful way of understanding my own post-adolescent sexual experience at the time (what exactly was I doing?), but has been an important focus for rethinking that ...”

“... of the radicals, in order to demonstrate that as a result of those activities the King “may” have been killed, and “must” have been put in danger of his life’. These arguments were first unveiled in September 1794 in the indictments against Thomas Hardy, shoemaker and secretary of the LCS, John Horne Tooke, philologist and radical man of ...”

“... Orbach – though she is not straightforward about this. The therapist whose narrative this is may look like Orbach, sound like Orbach, and in most obvious ways be indistinguishable from Orbach, but Orbach says she is not, strictly speaking, Orbach, but someone she has invented: her ‘therapist-on-the-page’. She has to be invented, because the six ...”

“... has made sure that bakeries have kept on working and the price of bread stays low. These efforts may seem paltry: there are severe shortages of mains electricity, fresh tap water and petrol of usable quality. But for many Sunnis in Mosul the Islamic State’s actions compare favourably with the sectarianism and criminality displayed by the Iraqi army and ...”

“... in detail from that of Aubrey Davis, the security guard who accompanied him to the site. It may be unfair to demand detailed and accurate recall of those moments when he and Davis marched along the smoke-filled Pentagon corridors on their way to the crash site, but there are more interesting lapses. According to the note his aide Stephen Cambone made of ...”

“... strangely transformed – he recognised them with a confused, astonished smile.’ The orientation may change but the erotic emotion is a constant, which is why, in the Joseph and His Brothers books, Mann, like Proust, can produce persuasive narratives of heterosexual feeling. One of the strengths of Death in Venice is the delicate pacing of Aschenbach’s ...”

“... books to him. Cooper infers that Walsingham ‘drank deeply from the wellspring of reform’ and may have been implicated (with other members of his family) in support for Lady Jane Grey and in Thomas Wyatt’s rebellion against Mary of 1553-54: perhaps this was one of the reasons he fled England shortly afterwards. No less formative was the St ...”

“... we often cannot confidently distinguish between the two. Even our list of possible outcomes may turn out to have omitted the ones that are most important in shaping events. Such an omission was one of the factors that led Long-Term Capital Management, a highly leveraged hedge fund set up by two Nobel Prize winning economists, to fail in 1998-2000. The ...”

“... in his penultimate paragraph, ‘is about as futile as trying to catch Scarbo in a bucket.’ It may seem a disconcerting admission to find at the end of a 350-page biography; but in fact it’s a positive and exact assessment, characteristically honest, and at the same time a high compliment to its subject. Both in himself and in his work Ravel has always ...”

“... But when the news of the suicide of his close friend Margaret Cravens interrupted his trip, he may have realised abruptly that we live one irreplaceable life, and ghosts are no substitute for one’s companions. It was a turning point. Cravens was an aspiring pianist, dear to a number of people in Pound’s circle. An heiress, she had struggled with ...”

“... inevitable.’ Indeed, those (if any) for whom history is still about great (or not so great) men may want to argue that it was just a series of personal failures of character and judgment at the critical moments: Asquith’s in 1915-16, MacDonald’s in 1930-31 and Chamberlain’s in 1938-39. But the influences at work were of course a great deal more ...”