“... others with respect doesn’t just happen, even with the best will in the world; to convey respect means finding the words and gestures which make it felt and convincing.’ But if that is the case, then not only will ‘sheer goodwill’ fail to provide the answer to the scarcity of respect, so will ‘institutional levelling’ of the inequalities woven into ...”

“... been chiming insistently with my reading of Phillip Blond’s Red Tory and my listening to David Cameron’s ‘big society, small government’ speeches. When Cameron speaks of Britain’s ‘atomised’ and ‘broken’ society, and calls for a return to a ‘broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and obligation’, or Blond writes about the ...”

“... chiefly to a mass public of what he would certainly have regarded as the lower orders by means of television serials about early Roman emperors. As the great Fernand Braudel observes, ‘the obscure history of everyman’ (l’histoire obscure de tout le monde) is ‘the history toward which, in different ways, all historiography tends at ...”

“... calls ‘the British landed establishment’, or, more vaguely still, ‘patricians’. By this he means three groups: the titular aristocracy (and their children) from the three countries of England, Scotland and Ireland; those members of the titular baronetage who held land (and their children); and those squires whose landed property amounted to well over a ...”

“... court of Lorraine, at Lunéville. She was fat, looking in her portrait by Tocqué a little like David Hume (her friends called her ‘La Grosse’); also hopelessly disorganised, full of neurasthenic aches and pains, and a great groaner and complainer – but this last somehow in a companionable fashion, showing she was as interested in ...”

“... and family life, on which the settlement’s ‘blueprint for growth’ was premised. By contrast, David Neal’s monograph opens with a successful legal action brought by a convict couple against one of the First Fleet captains. Neal is concerned to show how the establishment of the rule of law in a penal colony, at once a tautology and an oxymoron, created ...”

“... a highly readable and scrupulously accurate account of Marlowe’s life in its historical context, David Riggs’s The World of Christopher Marlowe (2004), which no new archival discoveries have rendered obsolete.* It is an even bigger difficulty that there is a similarly unsuperseded historically contextualised introduction to Marlowe’s literary ...”

“... name was Icek Judko Peretz; but in France he became known as André Perec. (Peretz in Hungarian means ‘pretzel’; in a typical cross-reference Gaspard Winckler, in the other half of W’s narrative, reveals that he never eats pretzels.) While his father’s family was originally quite prosperous, his mother grew up in the Warsaw ghetto; from there they ...”

“... how carefully Lawrence refuses to recognise virtue in anyone but himself’), and his sponsor David Pryce-Jones now finds F.R. Leavis much the same, so it may be legitimate to cite the famous excoriation of Bloomsbury that was voiced by Lawrence and amplified by Leavis: ‘they talked endlessly, but endlessly – and never, never a good thing said. They ...”

“... And many liberal-minded people would shriek with them. What press freedom could survive? Koss means to overturn this prejudice. He leaves aside the question of what we mean by the freedom of the press anyway, but contends that the quality of newspapers has declined as their links with political parties have dissolved. An immense and irrevocable ...”

“... dismissed Derek Lewis from his post as Director General of the Prison Service and appointed David Ramsbotham Chief Inspector of Prisons. Lewis then wrote a book about his experience – Hidden Agendas: Politics, Law and Disorder (1997) – which reflects very badly on Howard. Ramsbotham’s departure six years later was less publicly acrimonious ...”

“... altered and three were quashed. It’s easy to see why so many of these cases go to appeal. But as David Ormerod, the law commissioner, said to the Justice Select Committee, the outcome of these appeals – like those of the original trials – ‘are often perceived as illogical or unfair’. In May 2010 two South London gangs, Shanks and Guns and the ...”

“... On 11 February​ , David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo) in the US, announced that his team of almost a thousand scientists had detected evidence of gravitational waves emanating from a pair of black holes 1.3 billion light years from Earth. It was empirical confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity ...”

“... flourishes, and its crowning glories are the five volumes of the Poems edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins and published by Longman between 1995 and 2005. But the pleasures of scholarship are not wholly coextensive with those of reading. Students are probably still encouraged to enjoy the measured venom of the satires. But where to go beyond that? Paul ...”

“... Invisibility: Mastering the Art of Vanishing (Steve Richards, 1982, a peerless guide to the many means of making oneself disappear), and Time Is an Illusion (Chris Griscom, 1986, a seminal lesson in past-life therapy and the unreality of time). Steve Richards – a pseudonym, no relation to the biographer of Gordon Brown – may or may not still be in hiding ...”