“... and early 21st centuries, agnostic clerics such as John Robinson, the author of Honest to God, David Jenkins, the controversial bishop of Durham, the Scots Episcopalian bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, and the Anglican atheist Don Cupitt belong more convincingly in liberal ranks than with authentic enemies of the Enlightenment on the Christian ...”

“... to ‘scrap the Human Rights Act, and introduce a British Bill of Rights’, but that was in David Cameron’s 2015 manifesto. Johnson’s manifesto promised only to ‘update the Human Rights Act’ – hence the IHRAR – not repeal it.The consultation document gives very little away about what a new bill of rights might look like. How closely it might ...”

“... for the quick sketch that captured the essence of a man in a few physical details. Logan Pearsall Smith called him ‘the Rembrandt of English prose’. In his French Revolution, his private letters, and elsewhere, he dashes off one vignette after another. Fred Kaplan quotes one of the less well-known of these cameo portraits, depicting the French historian ...”

“... myopia’ for drawing lines between empirical psychology and philosophy. He urges a return to David Hume and William Whewell, for whom the two fields were one. ‘For much of the history of philosophy,’ Machery writes, ‘philosophers could not have imagined their philosophising as separate from not only mathematics, but also the empirical ...”

“... while the normal diet grew heavier and indigestion became endemic. Good digestion, said Sydney Smith, ‘is the great secret of life’. The science of nutrition was slow to catch up. The Carlyles’ doctor’s advice to avoid vegetables did nothing to relieve their constipation, as Jane recounted in her journals. In expanding cities space was under ...”

“... bookselling so this process is only now underway in Britain, with Waterstone’s assault on W.H. Smith. In historical terms, a late 20th-century chain is threatening to swallow a 19th-century wholesaler (which has done its share of swallowing in the past). On historical precedent, Waterstone’s should win; but, like Barnes and Noble, it may lose the next ...”

“... in telling such a story in the first place. In the film he is very sympathetically played by David Calder: this may be truer to Charles Wood’s screenplay than to life. There is no hint in this portrayal of the boorishness which never seems far from the surface of his own account. His wife, Jean Lawrence, is a shadowy presence in both book and film. She ...”

“... who can be relied on to take the most permissive position of anyone in the room.’ Wesley Smith, author of The Culture of Death, offers a more sinister vision of the ethics business, depicting bioethicists as a self-appointed corps of elite liberals plotting to take control of the American medical and judicial systems. Critical essays and editorials ...”

“... perhaps doubted whether the more serious charge would hold up. The trials of Robert Watt and David Downie, which revealed parallel plots for insurrection in London, Edinburgh and Dublin, set a more direct precedent. They were the first trials for high treason to take place in Scotland since the 1351 statute had become law there. The Government took its ...”

“... In​ 1975 David Bowie was in Los Angeles pretending to star in a film that wasn’t being made, adapted from a memoir he would never complete, to be called ‘The Return of the Thin White Duke’. This dubious pseudonymous character was first aired in an interview with Rolling Stone’s bumptious but canny young reporter Cameron Crowe; it soon became notorious ...”

“... of life now reigns in the thinking stratum of Chinese society, especially among the young. David Rice’s Dragon’s Brood is a marvellously fresh and immediate evocation of this confusion at what one might call the first level of perception – that of the serious visit. Rice is innocent of any real knowledge of Chinese culture or Chinese history, and ...”

“... was powerful enough, I avoided power. Then Mark stopped being the editor and there was Godfrey Smith, and then Magnus Linklater, both of whom were very nice. I was then called senior editor. The other day I went to see James Fox, who had the French edition of White Mischief, which I come into. He’d put originally that Francis Wyndham, one of the senior ...”

“... of modern print technology. We are at the dawn of a new technological age: what Anthony Smith describes as ‘the third revolution in communication’ – the others were the invention of writing and of printing. The computerisation of print through electronic technology opens up the possibility of an abundance of information becoming universally ...”

“... Early on, Jones mounts a pre-emptive defence against an accusation he knows is coming. When David Aaronovitch smarmily remarks, one Oxbridge-educated staff journalist to another, ‘here we are, having our elite discussion,’ Jones tells the reader: ‘Some will claim that I am, myself, a member of the establishment. But it is not someone’s ...”

“... lambent dullness played around his face’) – satire as longing, as true poetry. David Nichol Smith said: ‘He could not have given us our greatest epic; but he is our greatest satirist.’ Pope, who offers some strong competition, must have learned from Dryden the interaction of these two ideas. The gift ...”