“... chaos of mental life. The fact that the sins are negative categories is less discouraging than it may seem, since having concrete enemies to fight can be a spur to positive action.Self-Help from the Middle Ages raises some provocative questions about historical figures. Was Thomas Aquinas truly a glutton, or was he so absorbed in thought that he ate whatever ...”

“... a Jesuit boarding school in Belgium where he mixed with English students: his lifelong Anglophilia may have begun there. In Paris he found success and social connections. He was trained by former students of Ingres along with Degas, who became a close friend, and met Whistler while copying an Ingres at the Musée du Luxembourg. Portraits of high society and ...”

“... Harvard, she sacrificed her academic career to finish the editorial work her mother began. Readers may not agree with the version of Emily Dickinson they presented, or approve of the changes they made to her work, but if it hadn’t been for these two women, we might not have any Emily Dickinson at all.Born in Cambridge in 1856, Mabel Loomis was convinced from ...”

“... it the wealthiest club in the world, or at least the club with the wealthiest backers, which may not be the same thing. None of these teams has needed to move to follow the money. Instead, the money has come to them. What these new owners seem to want from English football is a stake in a glamorous and dynamic business with vast global appeal. This means ...”

“... keys to the safes, so that the most valuable items survived the raid. I reached the museum on 10 May, as part of a National Geographic group of Mesopotamian archaeologists. I was also a member of a Unesco fact-finding team, the rest of whom arrived in Baghdad several days later, having had difficulty getting permission to enter the country at all. In the ...”

“... about the elements, the character of the neutrino and the race to describe the structure of DNA may take this for granted, but we ought not to, for the availability of children’s books on such subjects depends on the existence of a culture of popular interest in science, something Holmes contends came into being during the period he describes. In England ...”

“... the heroic challengers of the system who rejected socialism and Soviet values, may find the combination surprising. But both the socialist commitment and the belief in reform were crucial to the collective identity of Zubok’s people. When they lost the first and were disappointed in the second after 1968, the whole imagined community ...”

“... in a flashback), and that, at the time she fixed the books to the ceiling, she was mad. This may or may not be plausible, but it absolves the symbolism from too comfortable a resting place in liberal piety. Qatrina had lost her sanity because of what she’d had to do and suffer under the Taliban: accused of ‘living ...”

“... him a summer job which leads to his involvement with corrupt Iraqi reconstruction contracts). It may be a consolation to some readers to think that Tony Blair, for instance, would admit to ‘stretching facts’ or reveal in private his contempt for the freedom he pays lip service to, but the scene is a fantasy, and, worse, it is also exactly the least ...”

“... was his role in the murder of Roque Dalton. Dalton joined the FMLN in December 1973. On 10 May 1975, he was killed by his comrades. The stories vary: he was injected with a sedative because his executioners could not bring themselves to shoot him with his eyes open; he was given poison, for the same reason; he was stood against a wall and shot in the ...”

“... Louise Bourgeois​ died, aged 98, in May 2010. Shortly before her death Jerry Gorovoy, her long-time assistant, found a forgotten box of her jottings, unpublished papers and diaries from her time in psychoanalysis. He had uncovered a similar stash six years earlier; together, the materials came to a thousand pages of notes ...”

“... conceal her sense of herself as inadequate and, so, in ways that other, more successful people may have seemed to her to have eluded, transparently mortal. That was the reason we had such a powerful interdict against staring: the gaze was a reminder, even an affirmation, of the looked-at person’s mortality. This is the reason the king must not be looked ...”

“... of murder. But in joint enterprise the courts have developed a legal principle that a person may be as guilty of a more serious crime, in this case murder, if they foresaw that someone might be killed by someone who has the requisite intention … The problem with that is that it is very hard to determine whether or not [someone] actually did foresee ...”

“... road to terrible work in literature or any other art is paved with excellent intentions. Intention may be where things begin – although accident too is a promising start – but the result includes quite a few other ingredients. But then the phrase ‘neither available nor desirable’, dogmatic as good polemical announcements need to be, doesn’t stand up ...”

“... tribal territories and is controlled by so-called ‘youth groups’ who represent the tribe. This may conjure up an image of adolescents playing table tennis in a church hall, but here a youth group is a gang of local hardmen who demand ‘community contributions’ for truck entry onto well sites and force oil companies to employ unskilled labourers from the ...”