“... Fulke Greville, whose life of Sidney is the more substantial of the two treatises edited by John Gouws as The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke – the other being A Letter to an Honourable Lady, where the lifelong bachelor Greville offered a mistreated wife (now unidentifiable, and perhaps imaginary) the questionable benefit of his advice and ...”

“... many devastations and upheavals before such a league of peoples comes to pass. But the natural laws which govern the development of our species, engendering a productive common order out of colliding individual wills in the form of a competitive economy which strengthens the state, should in the end also lead to the formation of a world society out of the ...”

“... that first used the atomic bomb under these circumstances, we have sinned grievously against the laws of God and against the people of Japan. In a life of public acts and public speaking, Niebuhr gave a concrete sense to the work of seeing the beam that is in your own eye. He did it characteristically by asking what we have in common with our unlucky ...”

“... a point. It was across from what would become the new St Patrick’s Cathedral. The archbishop, John Joseph Hughes, had intended to buy the land for his own residence but was outbid by Restell – payback for his denunciation of her from the pulpit. In revenge, Wright says, she built ‘a house so ostentatious that parishioners at St Patrick’s would be ...”

“... began by aborting Constitutional change and is ending in a state of Constitutional rigor mortis. John Major’s Government contemplates no political evolution whatever on the mainland, as distinct from in Ireland, and advertises this rigidity as ‘defence of the Union’. When it founders, however, such intransigence will be overtaken by long overdue ...”

“... young Robin was educated at home, where he showed remarkable precocity. His father, who was John Ruskin’s secretary, undertook the task of educating his son himself; Robin received from him a very wide and thorough education – in ancient and modern languages, history, science, music, art. In his Autobiography Collingwood reports having had a certain ...”

“... and no one wants to publish his novel; the doctor has him down as a malingerer; his wife and in-laws want him to be ‘sensible’, face up to his new responsibilities and take up a job in a banana warehouse; and a sinister doppelgänger appears to be on his trail, asking awkward questions. Worst of all, Tom has to witness the ‘dinging doon’ of the ...”

“... had an answer. There was nothing wrong with the paintings: ‘Christ is rendered according to the laws of true perspective.’ What Migne’s life showed, over and over again, was that as soon as some ecclesiastical work is carried out more efficiently than usual it becomes a parody of itself. This applies to the saving of souls as much as to the fabrication ...”

“... seems marvellous, when all the countries surrounding Africa are so forward in comparison,’ John Speke, discoverer of the source of the White Nile, observed. Very much a man of his time, Speke was necessarily less aware than we are today of the diversity of African societies, their extraordinary artistic wealth, and the antiquity of their trade with the ...”

“... government. The Republic puts the ideal city under the rule of the philosopher-king, and even the Laws. Plato’s final defence of the ‘second-best’, practicable city, envisages an ideological watchdog in the shape of the Nocturnal Council, staffed by a priesthood with powers of life and death over dissenters of all sorts. Stone is prone to hit Socrates ...”

“... Victorian Minds, presented a throng of thinkers, in a celebration of cerebration. And her study of John Stuart Mill suggested that different states of mind might dwell within the same body. The result of this approach is a rich and unusual brand of intellectual history: more interested in the typical and representative second-rate figure than the transcendent ...”

“... himself lamented that most Greeks of his day were in one way or other fundamentally irreligious (Laws, 948C). Hence the enlightened vision of ancient Greece, in which the Greeks are seen as a singular race, undisturbed by religious terrors, uncorrupted by superstitious folly, their lives governed by human reason – or misgoverned by human passion. The gods ...”

“... an array) which responds to the commands of its operators (players, citizens) according to the laws of physics, economics or morality or according to alternative rules if the programmer prefers. The simplest example is the flight simulator, a device that began life as the Link trainer, an enclosed cockpit with stubby wings that dipped and pitched and ...”

“... that the 1933 purge of Jews in public employment was ‘wildly popular’, that the Nuremberg Laws were ‘very popular’ and that Germans’ reaction to Kristallnacht showed their ‘enthusiasm for the eliminationist enterprise’. Unsubtantiated assertions like these are repeated throughout the book. They are essential to the argument because he ...”

“... philosophy. As a youth, Melbourne spent two winters in Glasgow, living plainly and studying with John Millar, disciple of David Hume and Adam Smith, and one of the most influential proselytisers for the Scottish Enlightenment. This experience gave him a strong commitment to the principles of political economy; it also profoundly influenced his thinking on ...”