“... prejudice’ and ‘moral prejudice’. In a case of reasoning prejudice, the jury may reach its verdict in a reasoned way but place too much emphasis on the evidence of a defendant’s propensity to commit crime. By moral prejudice the Law Commission was referring to the jury’s temptation to convict someone not by reason of the evidence put ...”

“... bounced higher from the chalk than it did off the dull clay of the Weald, where scuttling grubbers may well have been a bowler’s standby and a batsman’s nightmare.In a mere double century of pages, Start of Play roots cricket more firmly and knowledgeably within its social, economic and cultural matrix than any other book known to me. It emerges here in ...”

“... it: ‘Laurens, handsome and utterly charming, did not scruple to exploit the women around him. He may not have been the first to do that. However . . .’ He also complains that Van der Post was not much of a family man, but here the evidence is more equivocal. At the beginning of the war he sent his first wife back to South Africa with their two young ...”

“... grinding out the sentences that constituted Flaubert’s life-sentence in the service of Art (‘May I die like a dog,’ he wrote to du Camp, ‘rather than try to rush through even one sentence before it is properly ripe’). This self-flagellating devotion accounts in large measure for Henry James’s view of Flaubert as the ...”

“... what I am feeling is love only because I have language in the first place – the romantic view may need to be modified. In the beginning, then, was the repetition. My signature is authentic only if it is a reproduction of its previous versions. Postmodernism is entranced by imitation but sets itself sternly against mimesis, or the notion of realist ...”

“... Center. Even the American Medical Association’s ethics institute draws on industry funds. This may not be all that remarkable in an era when academic medical centres increasingly depend on corporate ‘partnerships’. But many individual bioethicists are embarking on private, for-profit consulting ventures with industry to supplement their university pay ...”

“... of the foundations for the Wars of the Roses. These views have not gone unchallenged. In the 1950s May McKisack wrote a sturdy defence of Edward (rightly praised by Mortimer). Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, in a series of books and articles based on extensive work in the record sources, Mark Ormrod argued vigorously that Edward had been a ...”

“... odious than odium theologicum. Can this possibly matter? MacCulloch admits that the Reformation may now seem like the story of two bald men fighting over a comb. But it mattered in Bremen. In the first phase of the Protestant Reformation, this great north German port, and its cathedral, fell into the hands of the Lutherans. When, thirty years later, the ...”

“... has less of a tradition of literary realism than England, though for an English critic to say so may require a degree of diplomacy. It may sound like saying that Ireland is deficient in realism in the same way that a nation might be deficient in hospitality or human rights. This is because realism is one of those terms ...”

“... coal mines. But we’ll brandish our sensitivities proudly (if not our safety pins, which may be too smug and lame a gesture), since they’re what we’ve got, and are anyway better than robotic numbness, better than ‘normalisation’. Yet figuring exactly which pretzel-shape to twist our sensitivities into – I’ll pity those who revile me, for ...”

“... focus on her teaching of philosophy. He insists that she excluded theurgy from her teaching. This may be true – in fact, it must be true, if by theurgy we mean ritual practices that would have alienated her Christian students. Still, Hypatia would have used ‘astrolabes and instruments of music’ to gain a better understanding of divine harmony: we ...”

“... owns (he’s a racketeer, it turns out), she remembers meeting him as a child and senses that he may know the answer to a question she has long suppressed: what happened to her father? (Was he offed by the mob, or did he simply run away, fed up with his bad luck and stifling home life?) The rest of the book mostly follows Anna in her quest, sometimes ...”

“... kicked out of their homes to make way for one of Edward I’s imposing ring of castles’. It may have happened seven hundred years ago, but it still grates. Today the English come to Wales not with weapons but with bank balances that enable them to buy second homes. And there is still resistance. Between 1979 and the 1990s a group called Meibion Glyndŵr ...”

“... and taking tea, or that in the city, far from the rarefied court, ‘Wretches hang that Jury-men may Dine’? Does the poem point, in short, to a skull beneath the flawless skin, or is the flawless skin the only thing that counts? As if such indeterminacies weren’t enough, Pope’s next move was to sneak out a bogus commentary of his own, written in the ...”

“... Three Persons in One but Two Persons at Loggerheads, with the Third having rather little to do.It may be that the Gnostic formulation, stripped of its allegorical apparatus, is closer to the feelings of ordinary people than official Trinitarianism. It also accounts for the general approval nowadays given to the dissident theology, the revived Gnosticism of ...”