“... are fascinated and appalled by the anties of their visitors. Least influenced of the six is Major Fohrbach, a legless bibliophile. His wife, Grete, and their housekeeper, Asta, enthusiastically invite seduction by Marwenne and Egg, respectively, and join the party when it resumes its journey across the world. Grete’s senile brother Olmers goes with ...”

“... Between​ the third and fifth centuries of the Christian era the major world religions ceased to sacrifice animals to appease their gods. For reasons that remain unclear, a practice that had been central to devotional behaviour for thousands of years came to appear grotesque. Joseph Farrell observes that the practice of duelling is now similarly ‘uniformly judged as outlandish and incomprehensible’, its ‘canons and creeds … as beyond recall as the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians ...”

“... the more or less stable consortia of leading booksellers who would pool resources in major ventures. They were called congers, a contemporary alleged, because ‘as a large conger eel is said to devour the small fry, so this united body overpowers young and single traders.’ But sometimes the single traders bit back, and Curll’s great skill ...”

“... Eastman’s career as editor, essayist, philosopher, translator, activist and poet made him a major figure in American intellectual life, and at times a glamorous one. But his journey across the political spectrum, from the bohemian radicalism of pre-war Greenwich Village, to Trotskyist left-oppositionism, to the conservatism of William F. Buckley’s ...”

“... from which they, like the rest of us, suffer – what Justice Holmes called their inarticulate major premises. They do not always succeed in doing so and sometimes they do not seem to be trying very hard. But the restraint is there. The professional restraint is that they inherit from their long life as practising barristers a knowledge of the development ...”

“... needler and picker of quarrels with his elders. The compulsion led to his death in a duel with Major Martynov, a duel strangely close – at least in its scenario – to the loaded encounter between Pechorin and Grushnitsky. The details of treachery are much less convincing in that encounter than they are, say, in Hamlet: a large percentage of A Hero of ...”

“... negative. Again, I believe he is wrong – or at any rate I hope he is. These, of course, are the major issues facing his country, and much of what he has to say reflects at least a measure of popular opinion. Willy-nilly, his beliefs, ambitions and actions are being inscribed in history. Khasbulatov would – does still – call himself a reformer, and ...”

“... capitalism’, claiming allegiance to a mixed economy in which the state would play the major role and capitalism would be confined to shops and small enterprises. Rutskoi in particular has long made plain his detestation of most aspects of market behaviour. Lebed claims to support reform, but when questioned, falls back on statist ...”

“... When he started off in particle physics, the field was in ‘a Tolstoyan phase’. Major discoveries were reached with home-made instruments for detecting cosmic rays: particles were accelerated free of charge by astronomical processes. Later came large, man-made accelerators. Particle physics entered ‘a long Napoleonic phase’ and became ...”

“... The most determined will arrange to disappear from the face of the earth, like Thomas Pynchon, a major force in modern fiction who is, to all biographical intents and purposes, a cipher. The morbid secretiveness of authors as a class compared, say, to film-stars, sportsmen or pop-musicians is mysterious. Are they ashamed of their lives? Do they feel that ...”

“... extremely few and surely inadvertent rather than ignorant. What I shall linger on, however, is a major change which remains unmade: that of the English title for Proust’s great work. Remembrance of Things Past is an improper title, long familiar to English readers but dispensable – it is not much used as a title, since most people, I fancy, talk of the ...”

“... Victor’s conception – an alfresco event, held 3000 feet up in the Vosges mountains – was a major in the Napoleonic Army. Soon, he had gone up to being General Hugo, and was showing considerable brutality in occupied Spain, before establishing himself as a hero in his son’s eyes by his futile defence of Thionville after the defeat on the ‘morne ...”

“... Gall (or St Gallen) was a town that ran on talk. It had no printing press, was some distance from major communication routes and about fifty miles from Zurich, the heart of the Swiss Reformation. But this relative isolation didn’t limit St Gallers’ hunger for news and rumour. Stories of Italian wars and Ottoman intrigues were swapped in the street and in ...”

“... Surrey is the Country of my Birth and my delight,’ John Evelyn told John Aubrey; and like Surrey, Evelyn has had more than his fair share of bad press over the years. Yet to picture him as simply the pious sermoniser the Victorians eulogised is as misleading as to write off Surrey as wall-to-wall Weybridge ...”

“... John Searle is known primarily for his extensive writings in the philosophy of language, but in recent years he has published some celebrated iconoclastic essays in the philosophy of mind. His ‘Minds, Brains, and Programs’, for example, challenged the fundamental assumption in artificial intelligence that cognition can be re-created by the manipulation of physical symbols according to a formal program ...”