“... strange seas of thought, alone’; Newton a young man and unwigged so that his head seems quite small and (appropriately) apple-like. We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the Fitzwilliam. I take in a chance selection of pictures, dictated ...”

“... Vladimir Stabnikov is waiting for us. I have met him before, in England and in the Soviet Union. Small, thick-set, black-eyed, densely-bearded, restlessly rubbing his hands, inexplicably powerful, grinning indefatigably, he wafts our party into the VIP lounge, where six or seven Africans are torpidly toying with glasses of Pepsi. After about ten minutes, all ...”

“... was published. The problems at the infirmary had become public largely through the efforts of Stephen Bolsin, a consultant anaesthetist with an interest in clinical audit, a process in which clinicians’ outcomes are measured. Bolsin became worried about the competence of these two surgeons to perform some of the more risky operations on ...”

“... thousand dedicated ‘cooks’ in 19th-century England. Quite well-to-do households got by with small numbers of servants, often supplemented by the unpaid labour of the unmarried women in the family. The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine drew attention to this silent levy on the energies of ‘dependent’ female relatives. To the extent that their ...”

“... compliance with their human rights. Human rights charters work best when the lawyers are only a small part of them. If the inquest cases brought under the act seem to have been effective this is not because they have functioned as ethical interventions by a far removed branch of government but because the concerns of the judges have found an echo across the ...”

“... we’re not campaigning any more: the election’s over.’ Before the putdown, McCain had looked small and confused – there was dead air all around him – but Obama by his response awarded him the pathos of a beaten man. An oddly unpleasant schoolmasterish moment. Obama’s besetting political fault is his automatic adoption of the tone of ...”

“... of territories, but also “unity of being”, an anarchy that sprang from the collision within a small and intimate island of seemingly irreconcilable cultures, unable to live together or to live apart, caught inextricably in the web of their tragic history.’ That was then, and the anarchs of those days have passed on. Joyce’s ...”

“... for an American public assumed to be reluctant to prolong its global mission. As the historian Stephen Wertheim has recently found, ‘isolationism’ wasn’t a word with much currency before the war; New Dealers fashioned it into a term of abuse to tar dissenters from US globalism – including those at home who were still committed to the equal legal ...”

“... But like several clever men who went out to India – Virginia Woolf’s uncle James Fitzjames Stephen, for example – his intelligence only intensified his reactionary instincts. Brought up in the lawless backwoods of Co. Tipperary, O’Dwyer believed in Order first and last (and not much Law to go with it). He regarded any reforms designed to give ...”

“... an experiment he tried to sit up, which confirmed he was in fact sitting up already, and the small red light which he thought might have been on the ceiling above him was just a standby light on the stereo system across the room.’ The moment Connell caught Marianne’s eye is easy to pinpoint. She was watching a football match in which the school team ...”

“... making people throb with awakenedness.‘Instead of the philosophy being the clue to Lawrence,’ Stephen Potter wrote in 1930, ‘it will be Lawrence who is the clue to the philosophy.’ Almost a century later, Wilson takes a similar tack, although she is clearly not much taken with the philosophy in its own right: ‘For all his claims to prophetic ...”

“... the ordeal. According to government figures, more than 45,000 people arrived in Britain in ‘small boats’ last year, with four dying in December alone.Lots of things read a bit differently if we think of Viola as an exile, including the overwrought sense of her history as a blank: ‘I am all the daughters of my father’s house/And all the brothers ...”

“... borrow or read. Anyone over eighteen could explore the marble labyrinths of what is now called the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building: a palace of the people on 42nd Street, traditionally known as the Main or Central Branch, with its encyclopedic holdings. In the reading room, battered but still grand, readers waited for their number to appear on the indicator ...”

“... with tutorial concern for the young. There were dons who coached the boat, such as Leslie Stephen. There was a college such as King’s, for centuries an Etonian preserve, where the young fellows had known the undergraduates when they were both together in College at Eton and treated them therefore as equals; Bradshaw, a formidable scholar, was at ...”

“... 1716 coincided almost exactly with the early stirrings of the landscape movement. A year earlier, Stephen Switzer, one of the first promoters of the picturesque style, published The Nobleman, Gentleman and Gardener’s Recreation and when Brown was three, Alexander Pope, who believed that ‘all gardening is landscape painting,’ began work on the house and ...”