“... and prefigured in the stories of the Old Testament, hidden again in his incarnation, and held to be present in the Eucharist. He is the object of a form of worship in which rational thinking supports an intense spirituality.Some of these pictures – above all those of Philippe de Champaigne – seem to be direct illustrations of Pascal’s paradox ...”

“... public, and threatened to undermine the respect in which figures of authority were supposed to be held. Outside Parliament they caused a sensation, for though Hone published only 3000 of each (and withdrew them from sale partly because they had offended his father), the notoriety given them in speeches by the attorney-general and Lord Sidmouth, the home ...”

“... and fleeting, an imposition from without, no sooner bestowed than withdrawn. Take the case of David Hume. In the dark days of logical (sic) positivism Hume’s reputation ran high as the philosopher who first did away with causal necessity; he was thought to have shown that causation consists in nothing, objectively, but constant conjunction: things ...”

“... young woman”, whereas a lady in her thirties could easily do so’. Authors cannot be held to blame for the boasts of their blurbs. Still, the claim that the professor’s is ‘the first comprehensive critical biography of Jane Austen for half a century’ is presumably licensed by his remark that the ‘last’ detailed critical biography dates ...”

“... of a very old idea: the Quantity Theory of Money. This theory, clearly present in the work of David Hume and David Ricardo, was formalised in the work of Alfred Marshall, A.C. Pigou and Irving Fisher at the beginning of this century. With the rise of Keynesianism, however, the primary lesson of the old-time religion ...”

“... birth falls on 7 February 2012, and Dickensians across the globe are stirring. Dickens, who held strong opinions about virtually everything, had his own view of such occasions. Michael Slater notes his ‘embarrassment’ and ‘irritation’ at the Shakespeare tercentenary celebrations of 1864: always for Dickens the best way for a writer or any other ...”

“... Leo Amery’s Birmingham, sixty years or so later, empire did not mean a great deal, to judge by David Cannadine’s memoir of his not very imperial childhood which he appends to his new book. Cannadine’s aim is to answer P.D. Morgan’s challenge to envisage the empire as ‘an entire interactive system, one vast interconnected world’. This requires a ...”

“... nexus, in favour of Spartan purity. The unlikely father of the ‘white cube effect’ was Casper David Friedrich, whose studio’s one ornament was a T-square dangling from the wall, a reminder of honest German craftsmanship in keeping with his penchant for woodwork and frame-design. Of course, Friedrich’s brand of mystical pietism was partly responsible ...”

“... was reticent and barely spoke, but became friends with a fellow student (and fellow photographer), David Armstrong. The camera became a solution to the problems of childhood, of growing up, of what was happening to her now – a way of proving her experiences were real.After leaving Satya, she moved into a flatshare with Armstrong in Boston. Her luminous ...”

“... number of survivors miraculously trickled back to England. Among them were the ship’s captain, David Cheap; his second-in-command, Robert Baynes; the chief gunner, John Bulkeley; the carpenter, John Cummins; and three young midshipmen, John Byron, Alexander Campbell and Isaac Morris. They returned home in rival groups, by different routes, telling ...”

“... from Lytle and Orgel, F.W. Kent and Patricia Simons have turned the proceedings of a conference held in Melbourne in 1983 into a valuable volume of essays on patronage in Renaissance Italy. What is particularly interesting about both collections is the fact that they discuss two kinds of patronage and, at least on occasion, the relations between them. The ...”

“... the victim of Mammon and the casualty of market forces. In the days when the Church still held an entrenched place in the fabric of British society, the responsibility for publishing its own biennial Who’s Who was one that rested proudly with the nation’s premier academic publishing-house, the Oxford University Press. Gradually, however, this ...”

“... away from the eyes of the international community. The ‘autonomy’ envisaged by the Camp David agreements is unlikely to extend beyond garbage collection. Ostensibly Two Minutes over Baghdad is a True Life Adventure Story in the ‘Entebbe’ tradition, in which an author trades his skills as a publicist against ‘inside’ information supplied by ...”

“... invention filled the political vacuum, at least in England. A regency was rejected; James was held to have abdicated; and the infant James, who should have succeeded his father, was passed over for the crown, on the specious pretence that the baby was a pretender, smuggled into the queen’s apartments in a warming pan. The crown passed instead to William ...”

“... not simply to pass on his sympathies. On 14 February 2017, when Comey still had his job, Trump held a meeting with him in the White House to try to persuade him to drop the FBI investigation into Michael Flynn, who had resigned the day before from his post as national security adviser. Flynn quit following the exposure of his contacts with Ambassador ...”