“... in 1655 – ‘The only thing I wish for is that you (who are more capable of it than anyone) may consider that task which Descartes started but did not finish, of strengthening our hopes of immortality’ – not realising that the gap between Hobbism and respectability was now too wide to be bridged by a joke. Another letter from Leibniz, which contains ...”

“... have intended individuals to fill up any particular station in which accidents of birth or fortune may have flung them.’ But it also accounts for his insistence on his wife’s retirement. A gentleman did not allow his wife to sing for money. And as it was impossible to be a public man without being a gentleman, ‘he could only move onto the public stage if ...”

“... his memoirs as a way of publicising a new cause: the unification of Italy. When he heard in May 1860 that Garibaldi had sailed for Sicily, Dumas changed his plans and followed in his schooner, the Emma. But not with all convenient speed. He missed the taking of Palermo, having dallied at Marseille to throw a party and stopped for a day in Sardinia to ...”

“... by reference to his youth, being imposed on his rule. He therefore had to start all over again. In May 1389, aged 22, he declared that he was an adult and intended to rule as one. In practice, Fletcher argues, what emerged in the next few years was a consensual regime that accepted and performed ‘Richard’s manhood through the household hospitality and ...”

“... leaves the subject free to accept or reject other ‘more saturated Jewish forms’. The person may choose to give it further attributes – religious, nationalist, communitarian, cultural and so on. But none of these Jewish shapes – which depend on basic choices since they can be assumed or renounced – can rightfully claim the allegiance of an ...”

“... is not harmony, as Treadwell had wilfully supposed, but ‘chaos, hostility and murder’. It may not have been quite that simple. The only way Treadwell could conceal from himself the abstractness of his love for the bears was to create around them an equal and opposite abstraction, also masquerading as real: a vision, precisely, of the universe as ...”

“... the last, to employ the information dump as a literary technique. But this is some dump.Trevelyan may well have conceived of Two Thousand Million Man-Power as the sort of novel of ideas Bennett would never have attempted. There’s a clue in the title. The phrase occurs in Ian Colvin’s ‘Social Survey of the World To-Day’, a chapter in the eighth and ...”

“... have been tracked to within a centimetre, moment by moment for decades.Given all this data, we may ask: are there any hints that a tiny primordial black hole, with a mass within the prescribed range for dark matter, has flown through the inner solar system? A flyby from a microscopic primordial black hole would set visible objects wobbling, just a tiny bit ...”

“... adventures. Hollinghurst extended his range abroad, with much of the book set in Belgium, and may even have taken Baker’s reference to overemphasis on sex as a challenge, in his description of the climactic erotic encounter, when the narrator at last has his way with Luc, a 17-year-old he has been employed to tutor. It’s Luc who finally initiates the ...”

“... the cannon and the firing-squad against the drawing-room and the kitchen stove. At the end of David Pownall’s book the protagonist and his confidant are shot. At the end of John Hearne’s the leading characters have been respectively drowned, decapitated and disembowelled, and the hero is about to be hanged. Ann Schlee’s story ends with her heroine ...”

“... What have Margaret Thatcher and David Steel in common, apart from holding the leadership of their respective political parties? Both are highly intelligent and educated persons with academic qualifications – Thatcher in chemistry and law, Steel in arts and law. Both have been called to the bar, and for both politics has been the main preoccupation of their adult lives ...”

“... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...”

“... a certain amount of huffing and puffing among the usually imperturbable gallery-going set about David Shrigley’s Brain Activity exhibition at the Hayward (until 13 May). People who value the power of art to shock far too highly ever to be shocked by it themselves, have nevertheless been somewhat put out, complaining ...”

“... In November of the following year he alerted his readers to the absence, in the art of David Hockney, of ‘the spiritual quest at the heart of modernism’. Several years later, in June 1981, he gave warning that the stained canvases of Morris Louis, the leading member of the ‘Washington Colour School’, did not represent the breakthrough that ...”

“... but himself. If he is in earnest – and if he isn’t we’ll not bother with him, any more than David Trotter does – he thought that he was testing his society by moving out to the periphery of that society, speaking for and with the disaffected, the vagabonds, the ill-adjusted. How disconcerting, then, to find that the disaffection he thought he was ...”