“... brought back from Patagonia – quite differently from the young Coleridgean anatomist Richard Owen. This divergent ‘reading’ reflected not only his distinct style of science – he was a field naturalist and Owen a museum anatomist – but also his evolutionary understanding (on which he was implacably opposed by the romantic ...”

“... not for economic reasons. They supported its political goals and were willing to pay an economic price, both personal and national, to help secure them. Such sacrifices are intelligible, Pincus indicates, once we grasp the ideological fervour behind the wars. In the early 1640s, the animating ideology was a synthesis of secular and messianic ...”

“... but sending their own children to private schools, of being forced to pay twice the normal price for food in accordance with this or that consumer boycott, of children forced out of school because of their parents’ membership of the ‘wrong’ trade union. Liberals often turned themselves inside out rather than see what was in front of their ...”

“... had never happened, and Britain was not a country so infused with the corporate spirit that Richard Branson is the first citizen of choice, according to opinion polls, for the unavailable post of president of UK plc. If boosterism and gee-whizzery were Leadbeater’s only faults, I would wish him luck and pass his book to the Oxfam shop. In normal ...”

“... Coote’s recent biography, or the sensitive but work-obsessed administrator who figures in Richard Ollard’s excellent but now rather elderly Life. Tomalin cannot compete with Ollard’s lovingly detailed understanding of Pepys’s work as a Naval administrator, and Ollard remains the best guide to the professional Pepys (his biography is still ...”

“... impose a shape on experience: to let life have its messiness, and let the book pay the necessary price in terms of formal imperfection. Anthony Powell’s four-volume memoirs, published from 1976 to 1982, are something of a masterpiece in this mode, combining a deceptive casualness of manner with an almost epigrammatical density of insight. Its pen portraits ...”

“... dismissed (which is pretty much Norman Lamont’s career in a nutshell). Later in the century, Richard FitzNeal, first as dean of Lincoln and latterly as bishop of London, continued in his day job in the church while moonlighting as treasurer ” for an apparently unbroken forty years. It’s as though Jim Callaghan were now preparing to leave 11 Downing ...”

“... and, if the neighbourhood did not make it socially pretty samey, then the outrageous price of the latte did. No one was smoking – it’s banned – and many of the customers were women. All of this makes the coffee house I go to a very different sort of place from those that proliferated in London from the middle of the 17th century; but ...”

“... of Vanity Fair. In ‘real life’, Meredith judiciously observes in his novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, ‘all hangs together,’ but that’s not obviously the way things work in the Meredithian world. What did his admirers see in him? A good place to start is G.M. Trevelyan’s The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith (1906), which helpfully ...”

“... with dusters. I don’t mean I want to play Burt Reynolds parts, only somewhere between him and Richard Wattis, say – those are the parameters.’She was a great woman, her performance of ‘Let’s Do It’ at the Albert Hall the stuff of legend. I just hope Noël Coward was still around to see it. I first met her, almost epically, in Sainsbury’s in ...”

“... But Hamilton went further in putting his vision into practice. He worked hand in glove with two of Richard Arkwright’s former apprentices, Samuel Slater and George Parkinson, to set up America’s first water-powered cotton mill. Both men had sworn on oath not to disclose the secrets of Arkwright’s water frame, and they were also breaking British laws ...”

“... a constellation of needs that are dealt with in straight society outside the arena of sex,’ Richard Goldstein argued in the Village Voice in 1983. ‘For gay men, sex, that most powerful implement of attachment and arousal, is also an agent of communion, replacing an often hostile family and even shaping politics. It represents an ecstatic break with ...”

“... privately think. World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price. But there is also the feeling that all the ‘civilised world’ (a phrase which Western leaders seem able to use without a trace of irony) is paying the price for its glib definitions of ‘terrorism’ and its refusal ...”

“... an icefield so it could set a transatlantic record that would push up his company’s share price, allowing him and his friends on the boat to profit by selling the shares. The hero is the German first officer, Petersen, who resists Ismay and then works selflessly to save the passengers, jumping into the icy water with a baby in his arms after failing ...”

“... is not inevitable: people persist in making judgments in the face of opposed appearances. The price of making it inevitable, I am afraid, is to build all the relevant normative standards into ‘recognition’ in the first place (‘If you really understand the premises ...’). This is to think that recognition involves, from the Sceptic’s own point of ...”