“... bold assumption. Strangely, neither of these historians has examined the possibility that Ptolemy may have kept a journal of his own. He was a literate man, even if not an admired stylist – his books probably formed the nucleus of the Library of Alexandria founded by his son – and there seems no reason why he should not have written up his diary within ...”

“... head was patted. ‘If you go on as you’ve begun,’ said the bloated biographer, ‘you may live to be a Bozzy yet.’ Preposterous, and risible: but the anecdote is as memorable as that of the young Walter Scott meeting Robert Burns in the house of Adam Ferguson. Edinburgh from the 1770s to the 1790s was Boswell’s to a far greater extent than ...”

“... counter-action strengthens Macfarlane’s case: but positive respect for the law and its sanctions may not be as crucial as he maintains. How violent was early modern England as a whole? In answering this question firmly in the negative, Macfarlane is generally persuasive, but our satisfaction should be tempered by two considerations: he has overstated the ...”

“... no less than 655. Great Writers indeed. Timothy Dwight, born in Northampton, Massachusetts 14 May 1752: ‘In his own time Timothy Dwight was a figure of towering significance.’ Arthur Murphy, born in Clomquin, Roscommon, 27 December 1727: his comedy The Upholsterer was produced in 1758, Alzuma in 1773. And while we are on the drama, let us remember ...”

“... it’s at the cost of abandoning all responsibility, as she runs towards a helicopter that may contain anyone: Americans? Frelimo? Cubans? ‘Saviours or murderers’, it no longer matters: ‘She runs: trusting herself with all the suppressed trust of a lifetime, alert, like a solitary animal at the season when animals neither seek a mate nor take ...”

“... career are the ones most likely to have been written about by previous writers. Mr Mackay may aim to restore unity to his study with his subtitle: ‘Intellectual Statesman’. Balfour was certainly intellectual and probably a statesman. But was he an ‘intellectual statesman’? If so, or indeed if not, what is an intellectual statesman? No clear ...”

“... felicitous, and is made accessible to the reader by means of a brief but helpful introduction. One may disagree with some of his decisions: ‘intellect’, in particular, which Mr Morris offers as a translation of Geist, seems to me a worse choice than ‘spirit’, Erich Heller’s word for it in The Ironic German. Still, unlike most of Mann’s previous ...”

“... with the famous poet and leader of the struggle for Greek independence? We do not know. But he may have remembered his liaison with the English lord as the happiest and most notable adventure of his boyhood. And Byron, who later managed to make the lives of so many women miserable, must have looked back on the affair with a certain satisfaction. That ...”

“... had only his new mathematical calculus and long arithmetic to do the same. Turing’s scientist may, of course, be tempted to overelaborate his model, but that has always been the weakness of the zealous theoretician. More significantly, he is bound to set up models that are easily computable, and to represent nature in terms of such models. The ...”

“... Until the 1620s there was nothing very remarkable about Richelieu’s personal assets, though 1619 may be a good date at which to begin to trace a change. In that year he became superintendent of the Queen Mother’s household. Under the umbrella of her administration, Dr Bergin tells us, a private administration of unprecedented size and scope gradually ...”

“... be disappointed if he had not also read Lucas and Koss. The presence of Koss’s monumental volume may have led Miss Brown to compress her own volume into smaller compass than she might otherwise have allowed, for Koss himself thanked her in his introduction. In a curious way, however, the books are complementary, not competitive, with Miss Brown’s far ...”

“... its rebellions only contribute to a debased fulfilment of its ideology’s impossible goals; there may be something inherently Stalinist about the Russian people, the book comes close to suggesting. It is most unfortunate that his English publisher has chosen to issue an abridged version of The Madhouse which omits ‘some of the more serious sociological and ...”

“... depend for their power on the implicit irony that, in Catullus’s words: Sunnes, that set, may rise againe: But if once we loose this light, ’Tis, with us, perpetuall night. If we must have utility, some is to be found as a by-product of the main achievement of the first half of the book, the disentangling and tracing of the various schemes of the ...”

“... of utterance. And yet there are causes of astonishment’ – inarticulateness – ‘which may befall the good as well as the bad.’ Most wonderfully of all, Perkins’s proposition that even a deathbed accusation of witchcraft should be used not as evidence but only as a basis for investigation was superseded in the late 18th century by a doctrine of ...”

“... and presided over, the Socratic ‘entirely as a sacrificial duty, and loathed it’. This may well be an exaggeration, since Lewis appears to have enjoyed above everything else occasions giving scope to the rapid cut and thrust of spoken controversy. John Lawlor, another pupil, has recorded that argument was the only form of conversation ever employed ...”