“... mentioned by Nicholas Rowe in 1709) adds force. The book opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of ...”

“... no sustained narratives of disease. Autobiographies in the shadow of death were rare and brief. In David Hume’s six-page-long account of his life there are four sentences about his impending end: ‘I was struck with a disorder in my bowels which at first gave me no alarm, but has since, as I apprehend it, become mortal and incurable. I now reckon upon a ...”

“... of ‘the delicious surplus of life’. Lamb’s own definition is thata pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect. It is an antic which does not stand upon manners, but comes bounding into the presence, and does not show the less comic for being dragged in sometimes by the ...”

“... associated. The purge of 1519, for instance, which has so engrossed Gwyn’s bête noire David Starkey, was ‘a storm in a tea-cup’. The truth, pronounces Gwyn, is that the political world of Wolsey’s ascendancy was ‘not an environment where faction flourished’. It was nevertheless an environment where the Duke of Buckingham got his head ...”

“... relations. The result would of course be a state-nation, a country defined by its institutions and laws rather than by its ethnos or imagined kinship. The only nationalism it can lay claim to will have a civic character, and political history must take the place of common descent or language. Time alone will turn such history into something like instinct, the ...”

“... available, well-used moulds. One of these turned up, somewhat oddly, in the New Statesman, where David Selbourne argued that what had been persistently overlooked was the fact that India wasn’t a country at all, but a sub-continent. This thesis has some truth in it, but there hangs about it an ancient and fish-like smell. It was, after all, a standard ...”

“... would betray confusion to deny that a legal system was valid because one thought that many of the laws in it were bad. On a parallel analysis of morality, two adherents of the same adequate moral system could disagree about its implications in a particular case, but this would be a real disagreement and it would not be possible for contradictory assertions to ...”

“... were insights in Wallace’s treatment of divergence which Darwin could turn to advantage. As David Kohn observed in a cogent dismissal of Brackman2, it is first necessary to distinguish between divergence as a purely taxonomic conception and divergence as an explanatory principle, integral to the dynamics of natural selection. Both Darwin and Wallace ...”

“... this in spite of a solemn pledge taken at a conference in Wembley to fight the Thatcher employment laws. From then on, Routledge argues, it was clear that the TUC – and thus the bulk of its affiliated unions – was a paper tiger. That is true as far as it goes. Equally important, however, is the fact that at Wembley and elsewhere, the TUC constantly pledged ...”

“... adopted it in a decorous shape for his longest and most ambitious work, The Moralists. David Hume, whom Diderot befriended in Paris in the 1760s, used it to scandalously sceptical effect in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, unpublishable until after his death. Diderot’s most famous work is a dialogue: Rameau’s Nephew, in which a ...”

“... v. Leviathan’, to borrow Orwell’s own terms, are inclined to hit this over-dramatic, David and Goliath note, including the mandatory weapons-upgrade from slingshot to ‘battered typewriter’ (it wouldn’t do for the typewriter to be newish and in quite good nick). Orwell does seem to have been a brave man when put to the test, but to speak of ...”

“... middle-aged people, and even some people holding blue and white flags with the star of David on them, representing the Jewish community, or so they said. Here I met my friend Vadim, a former employee of the Black Sea Shipping Company. These days he works for whatever foreign shipping agent needs a chief mate; he’s away at sea for months at a ...”

“... as a ‘new science’ – not the kind of science that deals in abstract truths and mathematical laws, but one in which the human mind struggles to recollect and reanimate the forms of its own past. As far as Croce was concerned, Vico was the first philosopher to move beyond the absolutism of traditional metaphysics, the first to see that truth is ‘not ...”

“... for murder or manslaughter, the police always vindicated. This isn’t simply against the laws of England; it’s against a more fundamental law – the law of averages. 16 April, Yorkshire. En route home and with half an hour to spare we stop briefly at Kirkstall Abbey, which R. has never seen. After Fountains, Byland and Rievaulx, Kirkstall is a bit ...”

“... broke in a stable of headstrong, ‘hyperindividualist’ contributors, including the young Henry David Thoreau, spending countless hours working on their ‘sublimo-slipshod’ submissions.Capper’s second volume, subtitled ‘The Public Years’, begins with a passage from Fuller’s private journal, written on the eve of the Dial’s first publication and ...”