“... the plague while in Newgate. We don’t know much about what Donne did when he left university. He may have travelled abroad. A ‘Jhon Downes’ is recorded in a list of household servants of the Catholic Earl of Derby from 1587, but it’s anyone’s guess whether or not that was the poet. Donne reappears in the records when in 1592 he entered Lincoln’s ...”

“... the effects of its opposite, and suggests that a relentless TV diet of sex and celebrity-gazing may bring about a ‘coarsening of the soul’. He’s not about to commission a remake of Civilisation, but his relish for the less salubrious side of his work is no longer what it was. Meanwhile, more meetings. Would we care for a screener of Sex Drives: The ...”

“... by the systematic application of the guidelines. But in determining whether this is true, it may not be the best strategy to listen only to the judges, for it should come as no surprise that judges, just like carpenters, police officers, customs officials and university professors, are hardly the best judges of the frequency and magnitude of their own ...”

“... of her cousin Salah and her brother Fahdi when they were sitting together in a café the previous May. Without preamble, the soldiers drew up and shot them. According to Victor, a bomb-laden car that Fahdi was to drive into Haifa the next day was parked only a few feet away. Jaradat fled but ‘ran directly into the arms of Yasser Obeidi, one of the most ...”

“... the Office of Legal Counsel states, ‘to set the terms and conditions under which the president may exercise his authority as commander-in-chief to control the conduct of operations during a war.’ I take this quotation from an article in Daedalus by Sanford Levinson, who associates this not entirely new American practice with the political theories of ...”

“... and sometimes an alibi – in the resulting ‘primacy of foreign policy’. But it may be time to ask whether the reaction has gone too far. It is at least counter-intuitive to explain the rise of an extreme nationalist movement with so little regard to Germany’s international position. The interaction of foreign policy and domestic politics ...”

“... even discussing a general amnesty or general disarmament and, amazingly, admitted that al-Qaida ‘may not account for most of the violence in Iraq’. The much trumpeted economic ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq is no more of a success. The most recent quarterly report to Congress of the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (Sigir), released in ...”

“... merely sending Robespierre to the Temple to check that ‘everything was quiet there.’ It may have been by the time he arrived: earlier, the guards had been forced to allow a delegation into the compound, to parade round the garden with the head of Marie Antoinette’s friend the Princesse de Lamballe on a pike. ‘My aunt and I heard the drums ...”

“... of violence and law enforcement, and sometimes of international respect. The public, by contrast, may find them less dreadful – often, in fact, less dreadful than the governments that are supposed to be serving and protecting their citizens. For centuries, pamphleteers have played with the fancy that the greatest thieves and murderers are not those dangling ...”

“... to that most American of novels, The Great Gatsby. Further associations between the two books may be triggered by the fact that both narrators, Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway and O’Neill’s Hans, work in finance, the former in bonds, the latter in oil futures. So we have a British novel on American themes narrated in English by a Dutchman mostly about ...”

“... taxonomic levels, my plant is a member of the Primula ‘family’, and below the species there may be varieties (or sub-species). What count as varieties to some authorities are distinct species to others – but we won’t go into that now. Common (or garden) usage, by comparison, is a mess: you can take your pick between ‘pretty shooting ...”

“... be taken over by Communists. The Russians would be marching down our high streets, and instead of May processions in the Virgin’s honour, there would be exhibitions of Cossack dancing. Miri Rubin’s excellent and learned book explores how the meaning of Mary was constructed and directed, how its possibilities blossomed out through two millennia and were ...”

“... Over the winter, you may have seen posters for a movie, certificate 12A (‘moderate fantasy violence and horror . . . limited bloody images’): a bunch of teenagers, Hollywood-dishy, but coloured to look like corpses, with greenish-tarnished complexions and uncanny eyes. The movie, Twilight, is about a coven of high-school vampires in the American Pacific Northwest, and is adapted from the first of a series of four novels by Stephenie Meyer; the last instalment, Breaking Dawn, came out last year ...”

“... to know what you think about how you are; his problem is that, before the conversation is over, he may well have developed your symptoms himself. Hypochondria is not – or not only – a form of self-indulgence. It is also a form of pathological empathy. Charles Darwin wanted to be a doctor, but was too sensitive to human suffering. It is a worrying thought ...”

“... A total loser – no clue!’ Such a reputation takes a lot of preserving. Orwell, in short, may have become more important as a symbol than for anything he actually wrote. Both of these books seek to reverse that suspicion, one by tethering the symbol to some distinctly fallible human flesh, the other by subjecting Orwell’s political prose to the kind ...”