“... published in March under the headline ‘The Threat of Saddam’. It announced that ‘the Kurds may have evidence’ of Saddam’s ‘ties to Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network’. The main link was Shahab. Hawks in Washington are keen to find such links. The joint FBI and CIA investigation into a report by Czech Intelligence that Mohammed Atta met an ...”

“... junior members of the Bar, ever sycophantic in their quest for advancement. Though the Telegraph may have been seeking to protect the innocence of its readers, there is nothing unusual in an ageing QC using his money and position to gain young admirers; nor about a gap between perceptions of the public and the private man. Yet, despite the excesses to which ...”

“... after the ejection of his patron (and former Lord High Admiral) James II. When Pepys died in May 1703, aged 70, the autopsy confirmed that he had lived hard: his lungs were full of black spots, his kidneys full of stones and his gut was discoloured and septic. And of course he wrote a diary, nine large volumes of it, which he began on 1 January 1660 and ...”

“... and dividing the weekends in London between his new and his old families. Unconventional this may have been, but as Wrigley shows, Taylor found it highly functional. Up at dawn and at the typewriter soon afterwards to tap out his thousand words a day (‘I try not to write more,’ he told Ved Mehta), he turned out a steady stream of books (including The ...”

“... brother-in-law Felipe IV to mark the solemn occasion. It’s an indication that Felipe at least may have believed the marriage would happen. But Charles had learned a trick or two in Spain. Once he was safely on his way, he coolly countermanded the orders for his proxy marriage, telling Bristol not to go ahead until he was assured that the infanta would not ...”

“... the commands of a God who is moral ruler of the world’. Lilla speculates that Kant may not have fully appreciated the opening he created for a Christian politics. After all, his concrete proposals for diminishing the violence caused by religious-political alliances were almost identical to Locke’s: ‘greater church-state separation, an end ...”

“... where that means something like ‘mediated by thought’. But plausible as that may seem, the thesis of Andy Clark’s new book, Supersizing the Mind, is that the mind v. world dualism is untenable. The best way through Clark’s book is to start by reading the foreword by David Chalmers and the paper by Clark and Chalmers that is reprinted ...”

“... as a cabaret performer. Opening the current Le Corbusier exhibition at the Barbican (until 24 May), the architect Rafael Viñoly revealed that the pair had already snatched a secret ten days together in Uruguay, Viñoly’s own country, before leaving for Europe, partying on their way back to Bordeaux on the Lutétia. Le Corbusier told his mother that ...”

“... from travellers and redial recent calls. If the call is answered by a government office the owner may be killed on the spot. Taliban rule is not total across southern Afghanistan, but much of the area has been a no man’s land since 2006. Afghan truckers carrying supplies for US or Nato forces have to pay local security companies for protection or bribe ...”

“... beyond the Call of Duty: The Nature of Power within Psychiatry’. Typos can be dangerous. Reality may not be as exciting, but finding it can be a great relief to a troubled mind. I describe this passing moment partly as an example of how easy it is to lose one’s bearings about what makes sense, but also, quite gratuitously, to avoid grappling with my real ...”

“... much about it, our thoughts inevitably turn to the Conservatives, and to what they might do after May 2010. In a very general sense we know what they would like to do: cut public expenditure so as to restore ‘order’ to the state’s finances. But everyone else would do that too, with more or less enthusiasm. More difficult to predict is the detail of ...”

“... girlfriend, a poor but pretty ballad-seller, is being violently interrupted by an older woman who may be his wife, and who, if we believe the account of the picture by Hogarth’s friend Jean André Rouquet, is also pregnant. The two women are rivals in politics as well as in love, the younger selling pro-Hanoverian papers, the older Jacobite ones. Apart from ...”

“... foetus and that the female’s ovum was no more than nutriment for their masculine structuring – may have been wayward; but he had provided a firm image against which others could pit their minds, an image enlivened by similes from more familiar scales of experience. His new microbiology captivated because even while it giddied the imagination, pointing ...”

“... Charlottesville gives her a place only because he worries that her scholarship-student boyfriend may get lonely in her absence and ‘become a danger to himself and white women’. Zink has a lot of fun giving the mother, Meg, a chance to expound Foucault’s theories of sexuality to an encounter group for unhappy smalltown housewives. (One of them recalls ...”

“... to the widespread Russian flu of the 1890s; it’s also possible that, being in peak fitness, they may have had a damagingly brisk immune response. Pregnant women were particularly vulnerable.The flu wasn’t Spanish at all. The name stuck when in May 1918 the Spanish king, the prime minister and his entire cabinet all came ...”