“... Raj off the coast of Burma, where his father, Walter Raleigh Trevelyan, was an Army captain. There may have been chain-gangs clanking away on the roads, and predatory savages on the neighbouring isles, but gracious living was not excluded: Government House had a ballroom the floor of which was polished by two murderers who held a third by the arms and legs and ...”

“... The bird-cage contains a live bird and the whole is reflected in a mirror opposite. London, 1 May. When Denholm Elliott is sent a script he opens it in the middle and reads a few pages. If he likes it, finds the characters interesting, he goes back to the beginning and reads it through. ‘You soon enough decide whether these are the kind of people you ...”

“... eat them, at which moment they are both tasted and smelled, via the back of the mouth? The answer may be partly psychological. Psychology does not seem to be McGee’s strong point: ‘If we eat half as many calories [by eating fructose instead of sucrose], we simply get hungry earlier’ begs a lot of questions. He will probably come up with more answers in ...”

“... Such activities made his youth the ‘years of pleasure’. While ivy-tower historians may analyse Ménétra as the prototypical homo faber of the Ancien Régime, some readers will fix on homo fornicator. These two themes – work and love – dominate the journal. Ménétra makes constant ‘offerings at Cupid’s altar’, and in later life sets ...”

“... his wartime service as an air-force bombardier, raining destruction out of the skies on Japan, he may have been in the grip of some great, unspecified gravity, as many GIs were. He spent the rest of his life wrestling with that gravity, puzzling to stay positive and afloat, making bad decisions that truly seemed good for a moment, but ultimately ...”

“... the judicial pendulum to the right, originalism, as Scalia’s diffidence about it foreshadowed, may well become an embarrassment. If it is now being discarded, Balkin has missed the party. The great political accident of Eisenhower’s nomination of Earl Warren to the post of chief justice in 1953 (in return for Warren’s clearing the way for ...”

“... a book, but the gossip was that advances were up, perhaps because editors have money today and may not have any tomorrow. It was the week of Book Expo America, and basements and penthouses had been rented. The view of the halfway finished One World Trade Center was new, but the faces in the crowd were familiar. I spent 11 years in New York, and now I ...”

“... Indeed, it turns out that quite a lot of perception works this way. ‘You see what you believe’ may be true; but it can’t be the whole truth. Accordingly, a couple of decades of cognitive psychology were invested in a search for ‘mental modules’. Enter the ‘massive’ modularity thesis that pretty much all cognitive processes are performed by ...”

“... had to make in order to raise taxes and fund their wars. As Richard Tuck has suggested, it may have been Charles himself who opened the door to democracy in England. Levying an ancient tax on coastal towns (ship money) to fund a naval expedition against the Dutch, the Crown made the claim that the people’s safety was the highest ground for political ...”

“... In May 1941, after the sudden flight to England of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, who had deluded himself that he could persuade the British to make peace, a joke went round Berlin. ‘So you’re the madman,’ Churchill says to Hess. ‘No,’ Hess replies, ‘only his deputy!’ That Hitler was insane was something many Germans came to believe in the later stages of the war ...”

“... about family and home. In the Middle East, bayt is sacred. Empires fall. Nations topple. Borders may shift or be realigned. Old loyalties may dissolve or, without warning, be altered. Home, whether it be structure or familiar ground, is, finally, the identity that does not fade. Shadid’s paternal ...”

“... moment when we first became conscious of ourselves in all our fragile splendour. Space travel may have stalled just as the balloon’s early dreams did, but satellites – the grandchildren of James Glaisher’s stratospheric ascents – have become integral to the global communications that have transformed the present, and on which our future is now ...”

“... has been running three a day, starting as soon as the election was announced. ‘Historically you may have placed more value on voter identification, so you wouldn’t spend huge amounts of time on the doorstep. But now, data you may have relied on for decades is completely out the window. You don’t know where the votes ...”

“... were copied by Christian scribes. As any student of Beowulf knows, however, filleting out what may be a remnant of pre-Christian culture is a difficult task.To reach the magical islands of Irish and Norse literature, all you need is a boat and a thirst for God or adventure, or both. In the earliest Greek texts, Egeler argues, the inhabitants of the ...”

“... in the same area?’ ‘That’s right, driving in that area is very dangerous: lock the door you may drown, unlock the door you may be stabbed.’ ‘We have several colleagues living near there, don’t we?’ Indeed, three of us live in the same civil servants’ community, only a block away from the Guangqumen ...”