“... demands our own. This is least surprising in Hinde. Ethology in the modern sense, and not John Stuart Mill’s, the study of animal behaviour, is self-evidently a biological science. And insofar as it concerns itself with non-human animals, it has no agents’ accounts to contend with. Least like a novelist, therefore, certainly least like a bad ...”

“... I don’t want to pretend that Machiavelli was actually a classic liberal, a precursor of John Locke, celebrating individual rights, the public/private distinction and the rule of law. The sanguine suggestion that a new ruler might make himself secure in regard to the political class by ‘doing away with them’ is enough to dispel any thought of ...”

“... least on the subject of miscegenation. Morone cites the case of Frances Willard of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a Christian Socialist aligned to the cause of labour unions, who could not bring herself to condemn the lynching of black males for ‘atrocities worse than death’. Similarly, Margaret Sanger, a ...”

“... Teeth exposed what Luttwak rightly calls the ‘tenth-century military renaissance’, and John Haldon, who has written extensively on Byzantine armies. Although Luttwak’s style reflects his journalism, his analyses are solidly rooted in recent Byzantine studies, which, as he observes in his preface, ‘have flourished as never before’. He ...”

“... Tractarians soon spotted the trick and duly advertised the inadequacies of natural theology as a Christian apologia. Rupke’s analysis is in line with that of other historians who have been stressing that the form and fortunes of natural theology have to be related to the wider social context in which the arguments were struck. Appeals to design were a ...”

“... own prose, and in the facts proven by Science; but he was revolted by tame, as he thought them, Christian conceptions of God and morally and politically was a rabid deteriorationist, for whom all historical movement was downwards. In the most exuberantly anti-social moments of his correspondence he writes as Disgusted of Croisset, whose opinion it is in the ...”

“... consisted of eleven elected settlers, five elected Indians, one elected Arab and one nominated Christian missionary ‘to advise on the affairs of the African population’. The Indians and Arabs were unhappy about the disparity of representation since together they outnumbered the settlers by more than three to one (32,924 Indians and Arabs, 9651 ...”

“... by theft and elopement and then by legal coercion to hand over a mass of wealth to Jessica and her Christian husband, Lorenzo. An Elizabethan audience would have responded with mixed feelings. On the one hand, Jessica takes and is then given by the Venetian court the sort of marriage portion and legacy she would expect. That she changes her faith would ...”

“... kind of thing. Gray’s first poetic response to West’s death was in Latin, a Roman rather than Christian lament added to his work in progress, ‘De Principiis Cogitandi’. In contrast, his much assailed English sonnet perfectly balances the resources of learning and the fact of grief. While, as a critic, Mack is thoughtful and helpful about Gray’s ...”

“... aristo to his friends in the pop music world, but his nobbier chums looked down on him a bit. John Richardson says: One of the odd things about Robert was that he always dressed up. The rest of us were in blue jeans and leather jackets and up to no good in the Village, but Robert always had an impeccable blazer, very Old Etonian, consciously so. I ...”

“... pupils, who included Aldous Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Peter Fleming, John Bayley – a literary macédoine to which several other ingredients could be added. As it fell out, I had myself no dealings with Lyttelton at school, knowing him only by sight. He had the air of being young for his age, a tall, apparently genial beak, well ...”

“... as I Benandanti in 1964, and has now been skilfully, even elegantly translated into English by John and Anne Tedeschi. Night Battles follows the fortunes of the benandanti through a series of Inquisition trials from 1575, when they first appear in the records, until 1676, when both they and the witches had ceased to be of much interest to the Church ...”

“... as he was with what he saw as the invasion of English and American universities by hordes of Christian critics.The Wimsatt Law, according to Empson, ‘lays down that no reader can grasp the intention of any author’, or with a slight variation, ‘says that no reader can ever grasp the intention of an author’. Since he thinks this proposition is both ...”

“... After the appearance of Poems of Mr John Milton in 1645, Milton published no further works of poetry until Paradise Lost in 1667. During the intervening decades he devoted almost the whole of his literary energies to attacking the Stuart monarchy and defending the creation of the English commonwealth and, later, the Cromwellian Protectorate ...”

“... she should take the fight all the way to the Democratic convention in August. And then there was John McCain, in what seemed to be a high school auditorium somewhere in Louisiana (even he wasn’t sure: he thought he was in New Orleans, but he wasn’t), addressing a few hundred sleepy geriatrics, struggling with the teleprompter and grinning weirdly at ...”