“... It seems to me that nothing approaching the truth has yet been said on this subject,’ Thomas Nagel says in the middle of this complex, wide-ranging and very interesting book; and he says it at the end of a chapter (on the freedom of the will) not, as some other philosophers might, at the beginning. The book argues in a determined way about the largest philosophical questions: the nature of reality, the possibility of knowledge, freedom, morality, the meaning of life ...”

“... basket in the bulrushes, the parting of the Red Sea – all recur insistently, though Esther is more troubled by the image of ‘the Hebrews leaving Egypt, Pharaoh’s army at their heels’, which she thinks will be the islanders’ fate (‘Pharaoh will come after us, like he always does’). Before Paradise is lost, a sinuous rhythm evokes Apple ...”

“... we knew his story as we knew the life of Nelson or St George. There was no such moving image for Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog (or Rottweiler) as there is not for Nelson’s Hardy or St George’s horse; the acts of the chief apostle are not celebrated. We know Huxley as a photograph or a cartoon: heavy-jawed and self-confident, or already fixed in ...”

“... to exterminate than to encourage’ them. In a penitential composed around 1216, the theologian Thomas Chobham complained about contortionists, professional flatterers and musicians who went to drinking establishments and inflamed their listeners with obscene songs. (He was kinder to entertainers who sang of saints and princes and comforted the sad and the ...”

“... new ranks of social scientists calculated the consequences of a rapidly changing French society. Thomas Kselman, in this superb new book, notes the paradox: hard facts about deadly disorders both heightened fears and raised hopes that solutions would follow. Government officials tackled problems of public hygiene, doctors formed professional organisations ...”

“... in 1575, she and her entourage probably admired his collection of ‘Turkish’ carpets; he owned more than eighty, including ‘a great fine carpet ofturkey makinge of orient colours’, ‘a greate turky carpet with grene wrethes & flowers of white and blewe’ and ‘a percian [Persian] carpet lyke turkye worke’. In Holbein’s great mural for Whitehall ...”

“... which prompted their removal. During all this time Cuba was consistently overshadowed by the still more volatile conflict summed up in the word ‘Berlin’ – the crisis of Communist authority (and of Russian prestige) represented by the tide of East German refugees escaping to the West through the jointly-occupied capital. On the one hand, Western powers ...”

“... possibly malaria) only a few days earlier, in the convent near Ravenna where her father had more or less abandoned her. Percy Shelley had been fond of the child: ‘with me/She was a special favourite,’ he wrote in ‘Julian and Maddalo’ (1818); waiting in Byron’s Venetian palazzo for her father to turn up, they had ‘sat there, rolling billiard ...”

“... parents that when they urged me as a three-year-old to learn Turkish, so that I might communicate more effectively with my playmates in Istanbul, where we had come in our flight from Hitler, I would have none of it. Let them learn German, I supposedly said; Turkish ‘ist eine häßliche Sprache’, an ugly language. German was my mother tongue, partly in the ...”

“... Mark was terror-stricken.’ Gjorg’s actions have served the law, and the custodians of the law, more fully than he realises. Mark recalls the look that the prince had given him at dinner … harsher than his words. That look seemed to say, you are the steward of the blood, and therefore you ought to be the chief instigator of feuds and acts of ...”

“... criminality and permanent poverty. And recently the violence has spread. If Chechnya itself is more peaceful, its neighbours are not. The seizure of School No. 1 in Beslan in North Ossetia in September last year was the worst attack, but there have been dozens of killings in formerly peaceful parts of the North Caucasus since then. Last month a ...”

“... styled to look decidedly Victorian, with their elaborate waistcoats, and haircuts and sideburns more Sergeant Cuff than Sergeant Pepper. The boys are expected to accept without question the absurd and often cruel practices of the institution, as well as its informal traditions: when one of the juniors is stripped of his trousers and tied upside down with ...”

“... Caroline Lamb. Lady Cowper was not being complimentary. She later described Caroline as being ‘more termagant than ever’. Such disparagement of the woman, who in 1812 had a notorious affair with Byron and was married to a future prime minister, was not confined to the Lamb family. Metternich’s mistress, Princess Lieven, referred to ‘that madwoman ...”

“... he added, was ‘less a subject for censure than regret’. Shelley’s friend and biographer, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, being himself a barrister, could not go quite so far, but his verdict was almost as sweeping: the most profound ignorance is ... the grand, unenviable distinction of the English lawyer – an animal too often drawn from the dregs of ...”

“... Thomas Mann wrote this engaging novella in a few weeks in 1943. (The new translation by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, which is brisk and direct, is a welcome replacement of the fussier and less accurate English version done by Helen Lowe-Porter for the original publication.) The novella was written after Mann helped pitch a film on the Ten Commandments to MGM ...”