“... to death for murder and again for piracy. He was hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping on Friday, 23 May 1701, and it is said that he was drunk at the time. Professor Ritchie’s account of Kidd’s last ten or twelve years is the result of an immense amount of reading: it goes deeply into the economic and cultural background of buccaneering and ...”

“... and unshakable savoir vivre, got up the noses of a good many matter-of-fact readers. We may note that Dalgliesh is now (A Taste for Death) afflicted with writer’s block: perhaps the two professions, the one involving practical, and the other metaphysical, elucidation, are incompatible after all. Dalgliesh last made an appearance in 1977, in Death ...”

“... was not always so visible. A character in Cicero invokes him thus: ‘Aristotle, whom I think I may with justice call the chief of all philosophers, with the exception of Plato’. Why so defensive? The implication is that even to rank Aristotle next after Plato is contentious, as if the thought was new and daring. Indeed it was. Aristotle died in 322 ...”

“... but to pass the information on to some organisation unconnected with either of them: the leak may be a trap set for her husband, an Air Force officer. Ironically, it is the very fact that he is completely innocent of any connections with such organisations, that his only friends turn out to sympathise with the regime, which places Francisco in his ...”

“... of the Sistine Ceiling, that Julius II’s ‘favourite theologian’ was a man whom the Pope may never have met, and whose work he may never have read? The bizarre combination of exceptional erudition and a complete lack of any acceptable historical method was one of the reasons he was such a compelling lecturer. The ...”

“... frightens me but the idea of enforced idleness. As long as I can write books, even though they may not be published, I think that I can be happy.’ He had retired 13 years earlier from the responsible position of travelling Post Office surveyor which he had held during most of his wage-earning life. The only complaint he voiced about this and his other ...”

“... Society lost the capacity to adapt, locking itself into one mould of greed and competition. ‘We may be just trundling along on a dead end which suddenly cuts off the whole of the human race very violently and rapidly.’ Unrestricted population growth, or pollution, are as likely to bring humanity to that dead end as nuclear war. And is there no way ...”

“... cancers of the bowel, breast and lung and dental caries. It is already a formidable list, and may have to be extended as further evidence becomes available. While there may be differences of opinion about the acceptability of some of these conditions as Western diseases, the general conclusion that many of them are now ...”

“... being taken to try to deal with the subtle and sometimes subconscious forms of discrimination that may have undesirable effects on girls’ aspirations. Thirdly, there have been many changes to the curriculum to meet newly recognised needs. These include the introduction of important subjects such as health education, provision for minority-group languages ...”

“... Public Industries, where Redwood and Hatch, while accepting that the concept of the PSBR may function as a crude check on official profligacy in an imperfect world, go so far as to admit that in an ideal world ‘the PSBR, as currently defined, is a theoretical nonsense.’) In any event, the future magnitude of an entity that can be neither ...”

“... in photographs and memoirs by friends and eye-witnesses than in his own writings – which may be what Gandhi intended: he declared that after 1920 his life was public property. Biography of Gandhi tends to hagiography, and for such purposes judgments about him have served better than judgments by him. Second, Gandhi, like Socrates, had trained himself ...”

“... correct: but in Wasserstein’s pages the early part of the story is obscured, for Samuel may well have missed a chance to bring the affair to an end in July 1912. The insinuation by Asquith, and by his official biographers, that he did not know about the American Marconi purchases until early in 1913 should never have been given credence. He knew ...”

“... as I hope we will see, necessarily so routes, right back to Slavenka Drakulic. Drakulic’s novel may be just a mediocre first novel, slightly interesting on what it is like to recover from a life-threatening illness, mostly uninteresting on everything else. But the essays she has collected in How we survived Communism and even laughed are a different ...”

“... of which inspired Sir Walter Scott to the curmudgeonly reflection that ‘wake where’er he may, man wakes to care and toil.’ So it proved with the Macmillans. Malcolm prospered though hard work on his poor land, becoming a tacks man, a kulak among crofters, who served as an elder of the Church of Scotland. His son Duncan, claimed by the revivalist ...”

“... little tribulations. From Wordsworth’s daffodils to Hughes’s brutal snowdrops, objects may flash upon the inward eye of English verse, but they are also carried alive into the heart by passion. Even that vice Anglais, nostalgia, Tennyson’s passion of the past, reinstates the metaphysics of presence, dealing not in absences but in the felt ...”