“... natural historical description and theological commentary. Some geologists, most notably Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology (1830-33), played down the role of catastrophes in the Earth’s history, hoping ‘to free the science from Moses’ and other forms of what he condemned as imaginative excess. Reliance on smaller-scale changes, such as ...”

“... The first sentence of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope is one of the most memorable openings in all literature: ‘After slapping Alexei Tolstoi in the face, M. immediately returned to Moscow. From there he rang Akmatova every day, begging her to come.’ That was in 1934, and in his indispensable Mandelstam, Clarence Brown outlined the circumstances which led to this smack, whose sharp report not only unloosed the avalanche in which the poet Osip Mandelstam perished but also prepared the volcanic action which would begin thirty years later when his widow Nadezhda Mandelstam sat down to write her memoirs ...”

“... in her care.’ In other words, Restell was probably the best third party anyone in New York could hope for. For those who could pay her fees – the charge for a surgical abortion peaked at $200 – Restell had an unusual talent for extricating women safely from pregnancy (‘safe’ is a very relative term when it comes to Victorian obstetrics). The ...”

“... way through, anyway. Of course, I’ve bought enough of them, of every sort, and in some cases the hope of their being read has extended over several years. For instance, I was almost sure I would tackle the distinguished art critic John Russell’s Paris (1960), ‘with photographs by Brassaï’, but never got past the pictures. I had slightly less ...”

“... for a dreamy sort of introspection: ‘You all sit and talk about each other’s souls,’ Lord Charles Beresford said. Their children, buoyant on champagne and self-belief, were the first to turn against them. ‘Their minds are almshouses [for] outworn notions and wrinkled phrases,’ Raymond Asquith, Margot’s stepson, sneered. ‘We do not hunt the ...”

“... a symbol of disunity. Images were not an issue, like predestination, which authorities could ever hope to confine to the learned obscurity of the schools: they would not go away, even when taken down. A parish divided on whether to bow to the altar was as hard to manage as a Parliament divided on whether to bow to the mace. The great strength of Dr Aston’s ...”

“... who have more recently thought about the matter (and who do not believe, as Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor now do, that in losing an encompassing faith we have lost all capacity to talk about the public good at all) agree that our own present sense of what, exactly, these two more lively kinds of argument for justice now are, and of how we might decide ...”

“... cheeks and eyes as bright   As sunlight on a stream;     Come back in tears, O memory, hope, love of finished years. Wonderful lines, but do they actually refer to anyone specific? Part of their magic seems to depend on tantalising the reader with the tacit suggestion that they do. Emily Dickinson made quite a speciality of this, in lines which ...”

“... seems to view Kolakowski’s rejection of Marxism as a personal betrayal of Professor Miliband. Charles Bettelheim’s study of Leninist Russia is fiercely denounced for daring to suggest that there was any organic connection between Leninism and Stalinism. Some grandmotherly remonstrances are made to the Soviet Union for meddling in Afghanistan and Eastern ...”

“... giving birth to evolution.’ ‘When a man desires ardently to know the truth,’ the pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce wrote at the close of the 19th century, ‘his first effort will be to imagine what that truth can be … It is not too much to say that next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecution of ...”

“... is now a common theme in discussions among the foreign policy elite. Conservative writers such as Charles Krauthammer forthrightly defend American empire as an exercise of raw power, while traditional liberals like Michael Ignatieff promote it as a way of protecting human rights against tyrannical regimes. Perhaps the leading current populariser of the idea ...”

“... atomic physicist and engineer, at a moment when once again practical science seemed to offer the hope of either a bright or else a catastrophic future. He completed his doctoral thesis in the mid-Fifties on the interaction between science and the Industrial Revolution, focusing on the Lunar Society, the celebrated Midlands group of intellectuals and ...”

“... Soon after he began the novel, Lawrence told Barbara Low that it was already ‘beyond all hope of ever being published’. When it was published in England, in 1921, Martin Secker cut out several of the milder homoerotic passages still remaining. Lawrence had the Hobson’s choice of either censoring himself, or having Women in Love suppressed ...”