“... 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 ...”

“... they were not tortured: they held very different beliefs about the supernatural. Confessions may be tainted by having been extracted through torture, but the verbatim record of interrogations can still tell us a good deal about the beliefs, and (as Lyndal Roper has shown) the psychic dramas, of the accused. Of the dozen books discussed here, Clark’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... here: you can’t simply say that inequality means we are all suffering together. Instead, it may mean that the poor are doing so badly that the rich aren’t interested in looking at the wider picture. They are focused on making sure they don’t wind up poor. This is why the difference between ‘almost everyone’ and ‘everyone on average’ matters ...”

“... choice. Policies that allow individuals to hold onto their money and do with it what they like may be economically efficient, but they are not particularly fair: many people will end up with less than they need and perhaps than they deserve. Progressive taxes, which are more equitable, are nevertheless not so efficient at generating future wealth. You ...”

“... grim and containing shots of what the censor called ‘actual’ sex, which I saw on 12 May 2000 as an alternative to Gladiator. François Truffaut, the patron saint of this weirdo sub-type, said that no child, on being asked to name their dream, replies: ‘I’m going to be a movie reviewer.’ He was wrong.The beginning of my obsession coincided ...”

“... this, some more information about your school education, for example, or your family background, may be useful.’ Coetzee, who was 33 and a lecturer in the University of Cape Town’s English department, replied: The information you suggest suggests that I settle for a particular identity I should feel most uneasy in. A few words about my schooling, for ...”

“... We are cheering for them, but the cheering does drown out quite a lot of other noises. ‘Viewers may ask,’ David Denby says in his very good review of this film in the New Yorker, ‘why it’s supposed to be better that hundreds, maybe thousands, of people in Harlem were destroyed by black gangsters rather than by ...”

“... and, more violently, how much they loved the heavily lipglossed singer in a band called Japan. David Sylvian was his name. The girls called him David. So far as I remember, the diary was a pretty spectacular fantasia of adolescent lusts and local hatreds: Dear Katherine, David came ...”

“... range of Brexit options at a Tory Conference fringe event in October, the former Brexit minister David Jones concluded: ‘If necessary, as Churchill once said, very well then, alone.’ This is the sort of nostalgia Stuart Hall warned against as early as the 1970s, and which Peter Ammon, the outgoing German ambassador in London, identified recently when he ...”

“... In J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, Disgrace, which is set in a violent post-apartheid South Africa, David Lurie, a Cape Town academic, reaches a similar conclusion when his daughter Lucy is gang-raped by three black men at her isolated homestead in the Eastern Cape. ‘But why did they hate me so?’ Lucy asks. ‘I had never set eyes on them.’ ‘It was ...”

“... to growing tabloid contempt until, in 1989, Douglas Hurd set up a Home Office committee under David Calcutt QC to consider measures (including legislative measures) to protect individual privacy against the press. Calcutt was given a year to report, and it was while his committee was at work that David Mellor, then a ...”

“... conclusions which so filled him with fright that he preferred to lock them away in his heart. He may (or he may not) have surmised that in the last analysis he aimed at something beyond the pale of Christianity; that, thought to the end, his true design was once for all to wreck the wall of fixed causes with their dogmas ...”

“... A student had decided to write something about London poetry – was there any? He’d toyed with David Gascoyne’s A Vagrant (‘They’re much the same in most ways, these great cities’), but decided that Paris was the principal focus there. He couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for the post-Olsonian outpourings of the Seventies, most notably Allen ...”