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“... lives he might have led, as a debtor like his father, or as a clerk or a journalist, jobs he held and discarded, stayed in his thoughts and haunted his novels. William James believed that the careers we might have chosen don’t matter very much: ‘Little by little, the habits, the knowledges, of the other career, which once lay so near, cease to be ...”

“... a few assigned them to various forgers; but others, notably John Benton and D.W. Robertson, held their sole author to be Abelard, who they said had channelled or even invented the passionate, unrepentant Heloise to point up his success in converting her. As the later epistles demonstrate, she was indeed converted, or at any rate agreed to ‘set the ...”

“... In the penultimate chapter of David Copperfield, David and Agnes, after ten years of uneventful but blissful marriage – ‘I had advanced in fame and fortune, my domestic joy was perfect’ – are sitting by the fire in their house in London, one night in spring, when they receive a visit from an elderly stranger ...”

“... radio, time-saving and sometimes life-saving conveniences which he disdained. In the words of David Grann, whose compelling new book, The Lost City of Z, tries to make sense of the man and his last mission, Fawcett ‘ventured into blank spots on the map with little more than a machete, a compass and an almost divine sense of purpose’. He was an ...”

“... the whole world more barbarous than that custom of these coasters in the west of England.’David Cressy, a historian of early modern Britain, wants to rescue these customs from such condescension. Coastal folk were not the immoral ‘wreckers’ of 18th-century myths, luring ships onto rocks with false lights; nor were they the proletarian heroes of ...”

“... beliefs may now be mainstream. A previously defining element that the beliefs are typically only held by a minority may require revision … Healthy scepticism may have tipped over into a breakdown of trust.’A friend, a BBC journalist, told me about a conversation he’d had with an acquaintance who began talking about the dangers of 5G and claimed that ...”

“... eternal return and amor fati is different from the question of whether the ideas can all be held without incoherence. A character like Faust suggests to me that the postulated philosopher would be a better ‘literary’ character if this web of beliefs turned out to be fatally flawed. Since Nehamas argues that the ideas really do form a coherent ...”

“... patriarch you’d unluckily got yourself the wrong side of, and quite another to find that men you held in veneration, men who had taken the trouble to interrogate you extensively about your personal and professional affairs, men who furthermore did not hesitate to ask you for advice and support when it suited them, could still treat you like an idiot or a ...”

“... of Edinburgh, Haile Selassie, Spiro Agnew and Imelda Marcos, among many others – his state was held up as a model of managed development. Then, during 1978, it fell apart. In late 1977 the eldest son of the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini, the loudest and most fearless of the shah’s critics, died of a heart attack. The ayatollah’s supporters blamed the shah ...”

“... Those lawyers turned gratefully to decisions made by the European Court of Human Rights which held that certain Abu Ghraib-like procedures employed by the British in Northern Ireland were not extreme enough to be called torture; the Israeli Supreme Court was similarly complacent when it decided that behaviour could be ‘cruel and inhuman’ without ...”

“... part in a rather more splendid version of it in Notre-Dame. Semmel has also uncovered the banquet held in Yarmouth to celebrate Napoleon’s defeat, which featured a table three-quarters of a mile long groaning under the iconic English dishes of roast beef and plum pudding, accompanied by strong beer. While the townspeople gobbled and guzzled, an effigy of ...”

“... And shall Trelawny die? It seems not, since David Crane’s book is the fourth life of him to have been published in the last sixty years. Yet it is an odd sort of immortality which leaves a man with someone else’s name in the title of his biography. It was Joseph Severn, the amiable artist whose kindness sweetened Keats’s last months, who referred to Trelawny as ‘Lord Byron’s jackal ...”

“... states of affairs currently preoccupying and bedevilling the unhappy place. However, after reading David Lamb’s The Africans these responses should be leavened with another one – despair. For this comprehensive and valuable survey of the status quo in sub-Saharan Africa is such a depressing catalogue of human iniquity that the reader experiences the same ...”

“... We have defied the laws of arithmetic,’ declared a buoyant David Steel after he had heard the result of the Croydon, North-West by-election, ‘One plus one really does equal three.’ It is now apparent that the public opinion polls were consistently correct in showing that, while support for the Liberal Party as such remained of a traditionally modest order and support for the Social Democrats alone was a similar or even smaller percentage, backing for the two-party alliance as a third force in British politics was a wholly different matter, and promised the chance of a complete breakthrough under the existing electoral system ...”

“... been said by so many to so few. Disconsolate citizens looked in vain for the orators who once held vast crowds spellbound addressing the weighty issues of the day. ‘It isn’t like Gladstone, is it?’ one Lancashire voter confided. ‘Where has it all gone?’ One answer is the familiar historian’s retort that the snows of yesteryear were never quite ...”