“... The inquest on Charles Bravo in 1876 lasted a month and provided his parents’ solicitor, George Lewis, with the national celebrity which made him the upper classes’ favourite, and most expensive, legal confidant. In 1865, Sir James Willes wept as he sentenced Constance Kent to death for suffocating her little brother and hiding his body in the ...”

“... America it reflected back to its distracted viewers. Joke-blowers filled the ozone: Milton Berle, George Gobel, Donald O’Connor, Jack Carter, Ernie Kovacs, Red Skelton. In this soporific landscape, Caesar’s brand of intelligent laughter – satirical, sketch-driven, character-based, artful – stood out like a good deed in a naughty world. It was ‘like ...”

“... poor old Land League were presented as non-constitutional headaches for O’Connell and Parnell. Michael Collins was a Treaty negotiator rather than a warlord. Outside in the world there were car bombs and hunger strikes, done in the name of our nation, in the name of history. Inside we were cleansing history, concentrating on those aspects of our past which ...”

“... Then there was the coronation of Edward VII, his funeral eight years later, the coronation of George V, and the outbreak of war in 1914. All these events could be and often were commemorated by schools in song, and the Tonic Sol-fa movement, with its concentration on singing in unison, was perfect for encouraging national songs as demonstrations of ...”

“... been a hybridising of science writers, nature journalists, writer-scientists. Diane Ackerman and George Schaller are representative of either end of an increasingly blurred spectrum. The lengthy reports gathered in The Moon by Whale Light (‘and Other Adventures among Bats, Penguins, Crocodilians and Whales’) were written for the New Yorker, on which ...”

“... greatly intensified since 11 September 2001. Its future was prepared by the non-election of George W. Bush in 2000, equivalent to the failed coronation of a pope in 1000. Simultaneously, the persistence of 1990s neoliberal science fiction (Homo economicus etc) provided some conceptual continuity for the usurper’s regime. Then, on the back of ...”

“... names a mention of Shakespeare prompts a reference to Plato, followed by John Stuart Mill, with George Orwell and Lewis Carroll bringing up the rear. Then come ten sections on the naming of birds, the ninth dealing with those named after people. He mentions my favourite of these, the ground-dwelling forest cisticola with a rufous face, throat and breast ...”

“... of art they encounter – particularly the feelings they feel they ought not to have. She quotes George Steiner, that ‘most mandarin of critics’, on Edith Piaf’s ‘Je Ne Regrette Rien’:‘The text is infantile, the tune stentorious, and the politics which enlisted the song unattractive,’ Steiner begins stonily, yet ‘the opening bars, the ...”

“... legally necessary. Wilmshurst’s line manager, the Foreign Office’s chief legal adviser, Sir Michael Wood, shared her view that a second resolution was legally necessary. But Wood did not resign. He briefly considered it, he told Chilcot, but decided not to follow Wilmshurst. ‘Questions of conscience are very individual questions,’ he told the ...”

“... was first inspired, not, as might be expected, by that great systematiser, Talcott Parsons, but by George Homans, a more modest theorist whose own work was firmly rooted in historical enquiry and the insistence on ‘bringing men back in’ to sociology. With unerring instincts and a fellowship to the United States, Runciman sought out the best empirical ...”

“... might well have exclaimed: ‘Iraq!’ So naturally I bristled like a retriever when George Bush began to compare Saddam Hussein with the leader of the Third Reich. Of course, since ‘appeasement’ is the standard metaphor whenever a test of American resolve is in prospect, the figure of Hitler is as difficult to exclude as the head of King ...”

“... this one; And that I would not; for at length I see Such scenes as those wherein my life begun. George Eliot, the most Wordsworthian of Victorian novelists, was alienated from her censorious brother Isaac, who objected to her freethinking career; but she ‘yearned’ to regain his good opinion. ‘School parted us,’ she recalls in her autobiographical ...”

“... that ‘Oedipus’ de-oculation concedes violability in the face of external impingements.’ For George Steiner, one reason for the supposed death of tragedy in the modern era is the fact that the two ideologies which shaped the period most deeply, Marxism and Christianity, are both anti-tragic doctrines. But this is to define tragedy as a narrative which ...”

“... 18th-century catgut? The oddest contribution – though also one of the most interesting – is Michael Spitzer’s analysis of the first movement of Symphony No. 46 in B and other pieces in terms of a theory of melody proposed by Eugene Narmour. The idea is that we perceive a minimal melodic event (the movement between two notes) according to its relation ...”

“... trial. But his name comes in handily because it has been coupled with MacCaig’s. This was by Michael Schmidt, who pointed out that the sort of figurative writing associated with Raine, patented as ‘ludic’, had been practised by MacCaig from long ago. What Schmidt had in mind must have been something like ‘Running Bull’: All his weight’s ...”