“... used his influence as Master of Magdalene to offer Benson a fellowship there, kind friends took as much of the pleasure out of it as they could by congratulating him on the skill with which Donaldson had done a classic job. It was a time when he slept badly, was nervous and irritable. His self-confidence was shaken. Should he try to make a mark in ...”

“... transferred to Broadmoor, the prison for the criminally insane.) Dennis Nilsen’s trial, which took place in 1983 for crimes committed between 1978 and 1983, saw a similar, equally unedifying clash of discourses – part of the problem being that the law makes a set of assumptions about free will and volitional action which wholly pre-empt the psychiatric ...”

“... hundred years earlier Defoe had not miscalculated his method but miscalculated his audience: they took him literally, and seriously. Pushkin found the same, putting it down to the ignorance and sentimentalism of the Russian reading public; and when Lermontov in 1840 brought out A Hero of Our Time it was received with the same literalness, and read according ...”

“... in a mechanical sense; Vico reappropriated it for metaphysics. Vico’s project, however, really took off when he confronted the challenge of modern scepticism, specifically the political scepticism of Machiavelli, Hobbes (above all), Spinoza, Locke and Bayle. On Lilla’s account, Descartes served as the foil for Vico’s fundamental metaphysical ...”

“... centuries, after which colonising the entire galaxy would be very much on the cards. Also that I took seriously Dyson’s vision of an infinitely prolonged future for our descendants. Even in something as concise as Imagined Worlds, a work of some two hundred pages with very few words per page, it is startling to find Dyson doing so little to explain this ...”

“... in a sandstorm, croaking out: ‘Follow the money.’ Bernstein and Woodward’s subsequent story took months to run its course, requiring as it did double-sourcing, deep analysis, painstaking consultation with lawyers as to publishability, judicious interplay between ‘reporting’ and ‘editorialising’. What has made the change, of course, is the ...”

“... The myth that Mars presented the distant spectacle of a dead or dying mighty civilisation took firm root with the popularising theories of Percival Lowell, at the turn of the century. It was bad astronomy, but excellent inspiration for romancers. Among Martian fantasies inspired by the ‘canals’, the most famous is Wells’s War of the Worlds ...”

“... that it remains a discipline more than an art.) During breaks from A la Recherche, Scott-Moncrieff took refuge in the altogether shorter and more urgent sentences of Stendhal, and in the plays of Pirandello. If he was drawn so greatly to Proust this may have been for technical rather than temperamental reasons, for he was not, by all accounts, a Proust-like ...”

“... be mightily deceived.’ Both Andropov’s election and his radical impact as General Secretary took observers by surprise. One reason was that the initial image of a ruthless secret police chief presented in the Western media was an inadequate summary of his political record and a misleading guide to his likely behaviour in office. The biographies by ...”

“... the same thing in the opposite way, among corpses rather than lively bodies. But Whitman, who took to Poe at once and liked his work, had a dark side too, and a sensuous passion for the dead and their graves, for night as the mother, and for oblivion. When his friend Horace Traubel, who also wanted to be his Boswell, interrogated Whitman about events in ...”

“... own kind of respectability. As distinctions and divisions crumbled in her imagination, her style took on an ever more compelling and more goblinesque accuracy. Her imagination had always centred less on Ireland than on the South Coast of England, where she had spent her girlhood, and in her last two novels place takes on a vividness at once hallucinatory and ...”

“... to Freud – was unable or unwilling to understand this strange turn of events, whereas Freud took thought and concluded that Breuer’s patient had transferred onto her doctor emotions originally felt for but never expressed to someone else (her father). The aborted exchange between Dr Breuer and the pseudonymous Anna O. was thus the true matrix of ...”

“... its long history, but the Italians couldn’t be considered the most serious of them. The battle took place in the highlands of the northern province of Tigray and began shortly before dawn on 1 March 1896. The Ethiopians had mobilised 120,000 men against a mixed force of 19,000 Italians and locally recruited colonial troops known as askari. Such numerical ...”

“... easy to imagine Blunkett saying it, for it nicely sums up the tragically self-important view he took of himself, and of the executive branch of government, during his time in office. It was a view shared by much of the New Labour administration. The law is the servant, they believed, of our duly elected political masters. It is what they say it is and what ...”

“... to Greek debt: can’t pay, won’t pay. The vote on the latest round of austerity measures took place in the middle of a 48-hour general strike. The Indignati are not stupid, and are well aware of two salient points. First, the ‘bailouts’, as they are always called, are no such thing. Taxpayer-funded capital injections into otherwise bankrupt banks ...”