“... was perhaps two per annum for each inhabitant, but about 42 in the first half of the 1880s.’ It may have been on this occasion that he observed that British cities tended to have two major football teams, not only one, and that this meant something. Some cities don’t, I reflected, while beginning to grasp the appeal of sociology, then in its heyday. It ...”

“... which not only evoke the type of frame that might originally have surrounded the painting, but may even be considered as an abstract or epitome of Bassano’s tightly interlaced composition, with the browns, yellows and whites of the painting matched by the partly gilded and silvered walnut.In another room, however, daylight has been cut out to protect ...”

“... turns to women and to love – to those desertions or ‘absences without leave’ which passion may bring about, and to desertion simply. The men exchange memories of troubles more or less humorous, among them a massive court-martialling once provoked by a trick played by one Boy Niven, who led a large group of seamen and marines on a wild-goose-chase in ...”

“... watch the Götterdämmerung of ineptocracy that is Brexit, they are baffled but entertained. There may be some well-deserved Schadenfreude as they watch what happens to a country that becomes addicted to fetishising its own nationhood and imbibes too many of the clichés it once produced for export: commonsensical, mild, tolerant people led by ...”

“... believers in the cult of personality, who range from newspaper editors to political historians, it may make very little difference. As John Kenneth Galbraith has observed, changing the top man in important business corporations rarely affects the price of their shares on the market. A rapid glance at the history of the USA also suggests scepticism about the ...”

“... watches the television screen. I watch the curtains, and imagine the swell of the water. A hotel may be luxurious; it may also be impoverished. Didion’s characters stay in luxury hotels but also middle-of-the-road establishments. No safe haven, a hotel is a cesspool that sucks the guest down into anonymity. In a ...”

“... in its domestic form, thanks to the recent fiscal and sexual peccadilloes of TV preachers, it may come as a surprise to learn that these organisations, NTM and SIL, dedicated to the completion of the Great Commission, represent the biggest missionary enterprise in Christian history. Such people have no time for the swaggerers and braggarts of the ...”

“... them by making us imagine that we see them. Where reality is shocking, realism of representation may entail shock. Realistic devices such as perspective, highlight, colour and motion are sometimes seen simply as devices for letting reality come through into the picture. But we know by now that the situation is not so simple. That a camera is present, that it ...”

“... it, is, in Tuan’s view, not only inherent in affection, it can be exercised upon anything that may be said to live. It is at this point that the peculiarity of the book begins to emerge, for Tuan ascribes life not only to animals and plants but also to water. Moreover he makes no distinctions between sentient and other natural beings. Anything in the ...”

“... never in the smallest degree be like life but only like other examples of literature. The paradox may briefly amuse them. They may conclude that whereas writers – novelists particularly – were instinctively conditioned to make reading seem like living, critics were programmed in the opposite direction – to point out ...”

“... be tedious to do so, and of little interest to most users of the book.’ Most users of the book may well agree: but it is nonetheless interesting to trace the history of a standard work, to see how authority takes or shifts its stance. Editorial revisions and additions, perhaps not in themselves extensive, may appreciably ...”

“... ritual, and specifically of magic and its relation with religion. Indeed, these social sciences may be said to have emerged from that study. The classics of modern social science, whether Durkheim, Mauss, Evans-Pritchard or Weber, have all been obsessed by these issues, which they connect more or less closely with the very origins of our own society. Here ...”

“... In the world which is entered by way of the computer people are often not what they seem; they may hide behind their screens and offer false descriptions of themselves. The boundaries between truth and fiction are hard to police in cyberspace – it could have been expressly made for tricksters, liars and fantasists ...”

“... says that lunulae are appropriate for any ‘unnecessary parcell of speach which nevertheless may be thence without any detriment to the rest’; and the notion is still current. But Leander for one would take exception to missing out ‘(come thither)’.Delectable – though I may as well take my small revenge ...”

“... his son-in-law, was the fourteenth signatory; Ludlow was the fortieth.After the Restoration in May 1660, the signatories found themselves hunted regicides. Ludlow left London for Dieppe in August and spent more than three decades in exile, in Geneva, Lausanne, Vevey and Bern. Revolutionary change in 1689 prompted him to risk returning to England, but this ...”