“... lodge, and, when they failed to recant, to be racked in the Tower.’ He searched his friend John Petit’s house for heretical literature and left him in prison, untried. He applauded the burning of a harmless leather seller called John Tewkesbury, noting: ‘There never was a wretch, I wene, better worthy.’ And he ...”

“... I received my serious call to a life of devout tennis-watching in the year (1947) when Mr Kramer took the men’s singles championship at Wimbledon. His court personality was that of a Nice American Kid. (He still speaks of latterday players as ‘kids’, a term that sits on John Newcombe and Stan Smith as askew as on a ...”

“... of progressive thinking, though it cannot be pretended that all the luminaries here marshalled took the right side. Shakespeare frequently took the wrong one; and probably few radicals have ever been progressive all round. A county petition in 1780, an expostulation against corruption and misgovernment, alluded to the ...”

“... they thinking?’ on the way back. In Paris, the college girls went to lectures at Sciences Po, took photos of sens interdit signs (as exotic as red phoneboxes), took seminars on the Communist Party, and read Sartre but not Beauvoir, who wasn’t thought suitable. They were strict about only talking French to each ...”

“... Chotsa chipewa! Choka!Take off your hat to me! Now scram!Say you’ve never heard of John Chilembwe,or of his mission church at MbombweHQ for his First War Risingfirst salvo for the Malawi nation.Yet as surely as my mother livedon the tracer-path planetleft behind in our world’s world lineso surely my memory discovers hernot in chemical coding but alive there stilland so surely John Chilembwe still gives offthat black light in his black preacher’s suitor is alive in all our pasts before our birthnot in the photos recovered when they shot him downbut still running from the troopstowards Moçambique unarmed, hot-fleshed,in dark blue coat, striped pyjama jacketcoloured shirt, grey flannel trousersrunning for about a mile beforeMlanje Police Private Naluso shot him;the bullet spun him around and around,Sergeant Useni hit him again,I hit him through the head,said Garnet Kaduya, Church of Scotland,in a language truly dead, but Chilembwe wasspinningas they pulled and snapped the life-threadin that present moment ...”

“... seemed so comic. But the early incredulity often made points which were lost when solemn passions took over. I remember an editorial conference, the Task Force scarcely beyond Finistère. Rights and wrongs had not yet come into the discussion; the argument was between those who thought something real was taking place and those who assumed they were having a ...”

“... as he saw them, that science offered. His response to Bergson’s half-hour peroration took less than a minute. Its pivotal declaration was: ‘Il n’y a donc pas un temps des philosophes’ – ‘The time of the philosophers does not exist.’ What Einstein said next was even more controversial: ‘There remains only a psychological time that ...”

“... 20th century seem quite other than the kind which Lewis’s Déco monologue expounded, foretold, took relish in. In a lucid introduction and in linking commentaries between the selections in the book, Julian Symons remarks on the way Lewis ‘formulated a philosophy radically critical of many shibboleths respected by the intellectual society of the ...”

“... a sense that justice has at last been done. Everyone who knew the full story of Dickens and Ternan took their knowledge, or almost all of it, to the grave. What we can gather about the relationship falls into three categories: incontrovertible facts, controversial facts, and hypotheses drawn from the facts. Incontrovertible is that Dickens first met Ellen ...”

“... with the optimistic view that higher education was the locomotive of economic growth. Thatcherism took an opposite view. It saw no correlation between the production of sociology graduates at Essex and cars at Cowley. In 1981, there began to be applied the Thatcherite-Joseph doctrine of ‘strength through starvation’. Cut and freeze were applied with the ...”

“... or ethnic hatred is a nefarious fabrication. Eventually, in the 19th century, nationalism took root, accompanied by the idea that a nation’s territory should include all its nationals. This idea gradually spread among Bosnia’s neighbours, in Serbia (then establishing itself as an independent state), and in Croatia (then part of the Habsburg ...”

“... there is little doubt that Neil Kinnock’s two speeches to the Labour Party Conference this year took much of their inspiration from the hard lesson he’d had of it as he watched the miners’ strike grind to its ineluctable defeat without being able to say much more than generalities about its conduct, trying vainly to pin responsibility on a government ...”

“... of its publisher (Murray), who wanted more advertisements. The editor, Charles Appleton, took the path of noble independence and destitution. The Academy paved the way for the TLS, in 1902. The conception of the paper marked a considerable surge of reactionary confidence. The ‘supplement’ tag with its implication of second fiddle was merely ...”

“... matter for argument whether by 1959 he was mellowing into a position of authority in the party: it took his death the following year to transform him into the maligned hero and inspiration of British socialism. From then on, an association with Bevan has been an asset to conjure with for an aspiring leader. Harold Wilson built his platform for the leadership ...”

“... they’re going to have trouble repaying their debts – debts which, to a large extent, they took over from the global banking system, to keep it solvent. As I argued when writing about the Greek crisis (LRB, 14 July), this is a huge problem for the eurozone in particular. The euro story has continued to evolve in the direction it was always likely to ...”