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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... above all, association football. So it is not surprising that what are generally accepted as the major North American contributions to the high culture of our century are rooted in popular and – the US being what it is – commercial entertainment: films and the music shaped by jazz. There is a notable difference between Hollywood and Forty-Second ...”

“... responsibility of science. Watson returned from Cambridge to the US and became director of a major research institute. His gift for the outrageously dismissive mauvais mot has never left him: its most recent manifestation a feud with the then director of the National Institutes of Health, Bernadine Healy, which resulted in his abrupt departure from his ...”

“... of the Soviet system completed six months before Brezhnev’s death. There is one complete dud: John Hazard’s contribution on Soviet legal trends. A man who accepts as ‘fact’ the Soviet Supreme Court’s claim that criminality in the Soviet Union has diminished since 1940, and who gives his readers to understand that the Soviet authorities resort to ...”

“... voters don’t care for outright independence and, understandably enough in an era which has seen major financial, security and environmental threats, prefer to be part of a large and resilient unit, though one which respects Scottish sensitivities. Salmond is crafty enough to shift easily between the high-flown rhetoric of nationalism and the reassuring ...”