“... in any case can’t be sure Chaucer committed. So my dark suspicions about the genre of biography may be rather self-serving. Not all literary biography fits the rubric of popular history. Some of it appeals more to the submerged fantasist, hoarder of dangerous titbits, or amateur detective. Merkin enjoys Panthea Reid’s account of Woolf as a guilty ...”

“... will of their own: if we have been ‘very much discompos’d’ by an insult, for instance, they may make us waste the rest of the day finding ‘a hundred subjects of discontent’ in every innocuous thing we encounter. The general point was illustrated with a story borrowed from Montaigne: ‘The case of a man, who being hung out from a high tower in a ...”

“... collars, and grey flannel suits march down city streets lined with offices and banks. Auschwitz may have been a world away from Levittown, but in Hannah Arendt’s vision of totalitarianism – ‘destroying all space between men and pressing men against each other’ – postwar writers found an apt description of social life as a whole. When Betty Friedan ...”

“... said during his final trial: ‘He hath been as a star at which the world hath gazed; but stars may fall, nay they must fall when they trouble the sphere wherein they abide.’ During his life Ralegh built up a reputation for fabulous wealth and bad behaviour that persisted well after his death. In the late 17th century, John Aubrey (who was good on ...”

“... The fact that a person is physically near to us, so that we have personal contact with him, may make it more likely that we shall assist him, but this does not show that we ought to help him rather than another who happens to be further away. It is a troubling argument. What Singer says is almost impossible to argue with, but also very difficult to ...”

“... fresh honey narcotic properties. On the south Black Sea coast, the rhododendron flowers in late May and early June, and the route along which the mercenaries were marching would have been blocked by snow earlier in the year. That dates the episode to around the end of May 400 BC, but an analysis of the earlier books makes ...”

“... as famous for her Falstaffs and Prosperos as for the heroines she played as a young woman. Louisa May Alcott thought Kemble ‘a whole stock company in herself’. Henry James, who recalled hearing her read King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a boy in London, professed himself still waiting some forty years later ‘for any approach to the splendid ...”

“... or the revelations of his doctor. Biographers have always had a difficult time with Chiang, which may explain why there have been so few of them; Madame Chiang was always much better copy, as we were reminded in her obituaries last year. Early pictures of Chiang at Dr Sun’s side, and as commander of the Whampoa military academy where he built the ...”

“... nationalism. It’s an alarming thought, but a plausible one, that it is Western Europe that may in future be seen as having been the exception. The danger posed by conservative religion, today as in the past, stems from the frequent association of its adherents with social groups that also consider themselves under threat from modernity and whose views ...”

“... for instance, regression goes back far enough) it can once more be brought to light.’ This may be an extreme position, but given a well-organised institutional or doctrinal subculture and a relatively small nation-state, it is by no means fanciful to imagine that ideas can be passed around and down in more or less unmodified form. Such, for Rose, is ...”

“... gas equipment is permitted to travel on the Arctic tundra. The impact of this third feedback loop may already be apparent: measurements from Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory show that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increased by 2.08 parts per million in 2002 and by 2.54 ppm in 2003, considerably higher than the 1.50 ppm average of recent ...”

“... in this case – exogenously, a given set of social arrangements is destabilised. The disruption may or may not be managed by re-equilibrating, restabilising mechanisms. If it isn’t, ‘there arises the need for a second phase of change . . . a phase of setting a direction of change and of organising the institution ...”

“... is hiding in the school. His identity papers are forged, and deportation to the death camps may await him if he is caught. His attention, however, is not on the dangers outside but on a mathematics lesson. When he first started taking the classes, ‘he sat uncomprehending before the meaningless words and numbers on the blackboard.’ Today, though, a ...”

“... first children, twin sons, were born in 1639; she was last pregnant in 1662, so her children may have frequented the schoolroom for rather more than twenty years; her translation of Lucretius could have taken her as long. Though she claimed to be ashamed of having defiled the streams of truth ‘with this Pagan mud’, she kept her translation by her and ...”

“... Reading may not make the world go round but it can make it go away, for a while. If one’s world is dirty, poor, oppressive and unfair, then that may be no small service. Books furnish the mind in a form that the bailiffs cannot repossess. If we could recover the reading practices of past generations, we would be in touch with an experience that was at once intimate and formative, on a par with, even part of, the history of love ...”