“... response to it. Epilepsy, Grant writes, is still ‘an enigma and something of a taboo subject. We may have conquered our fear of carcinomas but conditions like epilepsy remain truly disturbing.’ This presses the case too far. But the virtue of Grant’s memoiristic approach is that it gives a nuanced and particular account of how the stigma associated with ...”

“... executed for a crime of which ‘I solemnly declare that I am no more guilty than any of you who may now be hearing me.’ Cautioned by the sheriff, he signed off with the hope that ‘the principles of freedom, of humanity and of justice, will finally triumph over falsehood, tyranny and delusion, and every principle inimical to the interests of the human ...”

“... in September 1979; the detonation by India of several devices, one thermonuclear, at Pokhran in May 1998; and Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. Richelson presents each of these cases with his usual deep immersion in detail – sometimes failing to produce much in the way of insight or analysis. During World War Two, the ...”

“... hands, the Review included an outraged rejoinder. It was his alone, and ‘wherever the Author may be, the Papers are wrote with his own Hand, and the Originals may be seen at the Printers.’ Unflaggingly, the Review ran for more than nine years, first weekly, then twice weekly, then three times a week. It covered the ...”

“... paraphrasable it was probably up to no good (‘obscurity in a writer,’ he once wrote, ‘may be due not to concentration but to a refusal to speak out’). It was pernicious to be vague, he implied, and disingenuous to be opaque. The reader was entitled to know what the author thought, which meant knowing what his conflicts were. He wanted what he ...”

“... of experience’ or ‘The mind is the most powerful thing in the world.’ The Romantics may have invented this all-powerful sense of the aesthetic, but they invented the distrust of it as well. Keats could sound as rapt as anyone about the autonomy and power of the poetic mind (‘The great beauty of Poetry is, that it makes every thing every place ...”

“... of whether one is on the right track is whether most people think the contrary. Comrade Hitchens may still be susceptible to the pull of fraternity when embodied by old buddies from the New Left Review, but his self-ascribed identity now is as a ‘contrarian’. Being ‘independent’ (of parties, institutions, conventional wisdom, codes of politeness) is ...”

“... measure. The city empties and no one leaves home. It does it during festive days, when the streets may be crowded, but both work and traffic slow down or stop. It happens during the monsoons, when the antique sewers can’t cope, and the roads are waterlogged, trousers rolled up, sandals lost. On these days feelings of withdrawal, celebration and ...”

“... understand that they have much to gain from working with liberals, and that democratic governance may provide the ummah, and the faith itself, with better protection than a rigid Islamic state such as Iran or Saudi Arabia. Bayat describes the loose coalition of liberal and Islamist democrats as ‘post-Islamist’, in that they seek to establish ‘a pious ...”

“... the servant of ethics or beliefs. The artistry of his sermons, whatever private gratification it may have given him on its own account, was a means to an end: the amendment of his hearers’ lives and the salvation of their souls. ‘The only true praise of a sermon’, Andrewes declared, is the relinquishing of ‘some evil’, or the performance of ‘some ...”

“... Andrew Gimson, records that Boris was a quiet boy who had hearing difficulties – and it may be that the reason we can readily conceive Johnson aged seven is that the public persona of Johnson aged 47 is so irrepressibly boys-will-be-boys. With Livingstone the imagination struggles. The best it can do is a jam jar with a newt inside: the boy is ...”

“... even to himself’ – came easily to the young Leibniz, and that it may later have become a settled habit. On the other hand, Fontenelle found no evidence that Leibniz ever succumbed to greed or corruption, or even to compassion or the temptations of love. There was a credible rumour that when he reached his fifties his thoughts ...”

“... My dear!’ And his eyebrows would go up as if it were some kind of statement. Which it may well once have been, but was hardly the case in 1968. 4 April. News that this year’s Royal Show will be the last ought not to impinge, and that it does is because back in 1947 the first Royal Show since the war took place at York and a coachload of us were ...”

“... to London in 1844, he tried to play on his hosts’ anxieties: ‘Turkey is a dying man. We may endeavour to keep him alive but we shall not succeed … I fear only France.’ He believed he had secured an agreement with the prime minister, Robert Peel, and Lord Aberdeen, his foreign secretary; they thought there had been merely a friendly ...”

“... the usual limit of propriety. Then they become a bit more common (in the sense of frequent; they may also come to be regarded as less ‘common’ in the social sense). They do so because they can perform so many social and grammatical functions. They can fill in pauses, establish gender identities, build a group, or serve as all-purpose markers of ...”