“... discovered on temple sites, we find this (written backwards) in the sacred spring at Bath: ‘May he who carried off Vilbia from me become liquid as the water; may she who so obscenely ate her lose the power of speech ...’ (eight suspects are listed, five men and three women). The evidence available for the study of ...”

“... Fifteen thousand candidates contested 545 seats in the Indian lower house, the Lok Sabha, in the May General Election. Four hundred million of the 590 million who were eligible to do so voted. It was the largest election in history. Yet it might have seemed odd. The Congress Government has been introducing far-reaching reforms ...”

“... a first in PPE. He there began a research degree in Hegel’s philosophy of history. Hegelian he may have been by choice, but he was at Oxford during the postwar glory days of ordinary language philosophy. That shows wonderfully in the correspondence. Life was not easy on him. He was for many years a Communist, not so terrible a thing in those days for an ...”

“... you come all the way across the room to tell me that? How kind.” ’ ‘American-style’ may be a hint that in the writer’s opinion Macdonald deserved this put-down, for being an Anglophile American if for nothing else. I find it hard to believe she really takes this view, but whether she does or not, the remark she reports might still provoke an ...”

“... classics would continue to mark much of the scientific project throughout the long modernity which may or may not have now come to an end, wrecked or perhaps just beached on the shores of the Postmodern. Philip Fisher’s new book, however, makes a daring case for the continued relevance of pre-Christian ideas about the ...”

“... is to be communicated; nor with the situation of others to whom the information or opinion may relate; nor with the situation of those who desire information and cannot get it, or who need information which they do not know exists, or whose lives and possibilities are blighted by silence or lies. Do they have anything worth calling a right to ...”

“... of grave rituals all signal belief of some kind, but the beliefs of the prehistoric millennia may have been as different from one another as any one of them was from the later documented religions; and the changes from one practice to another, like the change from long barrows to stone circles, or the later and sudden abandonment of henges, even the ...”

“... last time I made the wrong choice. (Could I hit someone with a baseball bat? Perhaps.) This may be completely unnecessary. Or it might not. The Women’s Freedom Center of Brattleboro, Vermont has advised me to leave at once for my mother’s home in DC: ‘We don’t know what’s going on in his head.’ The director of victim services at the Vermont ...”

“... certain way, made a particular decision. Indeed, in many real-life situations even that inference may go too far. One of Kahneman’s more disconcerting results suggests that people’s valuations can readily be manipulated if before making their estimate they are primed with an irrelevant ‘anchoring’ number. For example, subjects asked to guess ...”

“... that ‘what seems to be the fragmentation in philosophy found at the end of the 20th century may be due to more than the institutional imperatives of specialisation and professionalisation. It may be inherent in the subject itself.’ Philosophers used to think that the point of their discipline was to attain a ...”

“... from resourceful young bushytail to mangy endgame quarry’. But however much future historians may discover which is unknown to the commentators of the present day, and however right or wrong Blair may be in believing that they will be kind to him, it is unlikely that either his committed admirers or his committed ...”

“... icon of English history. We have a number of accounts of his death, all of which differ. What may well be the earliest version (though not all historians agree) has him cut down by William himself, together with the author’s local lord and his nephew. This is the least likely to be true. The second earliest source contradicts all the others by recording ...”

“... in the UK in 2017 after a van drove into pedestrians on London Bridge. So the prospect that IS may still fight on remains a live concern around the world. Americans and Europeans may not care what happens to the Kurds, or who rules in Damascus and Baghdad, but they do worry about IS – because IS is a threat to ...”

“... portrait of Lamb – and Oldman’s portrayal of him – is a careful balancing act. He may look, and sound, most of the time, like a washed-up ex-spy, a broken man, alcoholic, overweight, chain-smoking, abusive, sexist, racist, the world’s worst boss. But we mustn’t forget that earlier in his career he spent many years behind the Berlin ...”

“... jokes – or the wrong kind of unseriousness – is unlikely to inspire confidence in a reader who may already feel compromised by the fact that he is reading such a book: is he an earnest saddie, one of those people who needs an explanation for everything, and particularly his pleasure? Books that explain poems, or dreams, or even sex can add to our pleasure ...”