“... the amorous and attractive Cunizza da Romano. Their next stop is the Sun, where the wise, such as Thomas Aquinas and Solomon, are congregated. Then they travel to Mars and meet heaven’s warriors, the Church Militant, including Dante’s great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida. Jupiter is the heaven of justice; moving on to Saturn, Dante finds the contemplatives ...”

“... representative of the Age of Reason. In particular, he hoped to challenge the condescension of Thomas Carlyle, who dismissed Hume as an associate of Voltaire and the French philosophes, and a slave to the ‘obscurations of sense, which eclipse this truth within us’. Hume had imagined, according to Carlyle, that the mechanistic logic with which he ...”

“... to the full her talents as a close reader of word and image: one on the novel of ideas from Thomas Mann to J.M. Coetzee and Nicola Barker; the other on the creepily insouciant photographs of Torbjørn Rødland. In both cases, the gimmick’s compromised form seems like the only way to accommodate ‘“ideas” imported from criticism or ...”

“... Logico-Philosophicus in 1916. The loss would be unfathomable.In Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers, Cheryl Misak shows us how much Ramsey achieved in the little time he had. Her book is not the first to tell the story of his life: an unfinished memoir by his younger sister, Margaret Paul, was published in 2012, but it was missing a crucial chapter ...”

“... was a growing political force whose immediate enemy were the colonial and ex-colonial European powers. The new Jewish state of Israel, set on land Palestinians knew as their own, was also a goad.’ As an account of the last sixty years, Lessons is an embarrassment – so it’s fortunate that, being a psychologically minded novelist, McEwan has designs ...”

“... salvation, in a sweeping pose, with fanfares, lighting effects and scenery.’ For the Entente powers, the German war machine was a sort of Wagnerian nightmare.Hitler’s obsession with Wagner’s music seemed to settle the matter. Gustav Stresemann, chancellor of the Weimar Republic, despaired at the way the Bayreuth clique had managed to ‘touch up the ...”

“... he found himself faced with a case of such complexity. The juge d’instruction has considerable powers: it is he who gathers information and directs the investigation. Le petit juge was not effective at either. The trouble was that Judge Lambert talked too much, and allowed everyone working for him to gossip. He also talked, with extraordinary freedom, both ...”

“... fashionable Emersonian leader of metropolitan free thought, and was employed as a pamphleteer by Thomas Scott, Voysey’s wealthy patron. These unconventional yet genteel circles were only the prelude to a yet more drastic move into the plebeian world of secularism. By 1875 she had accepted employment on Charles Bradlaugh’s National Reformer and begun her ...”

“... divorce. As he wrote in Love and Exile, ‘I had made up my mind a long time ago that the creative powers of literature lie not in the forced originality produced by variations of style and word machinations but in the countless situations life keeps creating, especially in the queer complications between man and woman. For the writer, they are potential ...”

“... his career was a slippery mixture of principled conviction and clever accommodation to the ruling powers. There is a curious moment in his preface where he goes out of his way to assert that Virgil was ‘still of republican principles in his heart’. He then contrives to make Augustus sound like a constitutional monarch and so edges a step closer to the new ...”

“... Party, and of the Archbishop’s energetic cultivation of his standing among the non-aligned powers. Plans worked out by the former Secretary of State Dean Acheson would have provided for another bargain between Greeks and Turks over the heads of the two Cypriot communities, under which most of the island would have gone to Greece, with some protection ...”

“... Until the 17th century this country remained, in this respect, on the fringe of Europe. Then Thomas Gataker, who turned down the Mastership of Trinity, practised critical scholarship in his commentary on Marcus Aurelius, and John Pearson, an eminent theologian, who was successively Master of Jesus, Master of Trinity and Bishop of Chester, displayed it in ...”

“... in the early summer of 1933 …’ Sebald borrowed this habit of repetitive attribution from Thomas Bernhard, who also influenced Sebald’s diction of extremism. Almost every sentence in this book is a cunning combination of the quiet and the loud: ‘As usual when I go down to London on my own,’ the narrator tells us in a fairly typical passage, ‘a ...”

“... Then there’s Doctor Reichhardt, the artist imprisoned for his ideals, but he is more of a Thomas Mann-style grand bourgeois. Perhaps the multiple self-portraits make sense: there’s always more than one Hans Fallada. In Fallada’s 1942 memoir, Damals bei uns daheim (Our Home in Days Gone By), he describes himself as a Pechvogel, an unlucky ...”

“... Here are the nominees for the greatest bad argument in political theory. They are: Thomas Hobbes, for Leviathan; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, for The Communist Manifesto; and Plato, for the Republic. Why them? Each of the candidates is hallowed as a Penguin Classic. Each has been foisted on freshman generations in Pol Phil 101 ...”