“... that senses are sometimes given to concepts at Oxford after the gates close to visitors; but that may be a leg-pull.) Nor am I clear what you’re supposed to do with a notion once a sense has been given it. There used to be a story according to which empirical inquiry works by first giving senses to notions, and then scouting around for something for the ...”

“... staircase, apparently intending to reach the strongbox. He was paid off just in time. The Humberts may have treated written agreements with scorn, but they had a sympathetic respect for physical aggression and criminal damage. An unnamed creditor turned up one morning, demanding a repayment of 250,000 francs (about £750,000 today). He waited with the other ...”

“... and her ‘great difficulty’ in stopping ‘my husband in trying to break the bank’. Alfred may also have enjoyed the nightlife, but his main aim must have been to improve his health, or perhaps just to die in a pleasant place. He had spent much of his adult life in Ware Park Sanitorium in Hertfordshire. Nine of his siblings had died of TB, in infancy ...”

“... when gay sex was a crime. Yet the novel suggests that the legalisation of homosexuality in 1967 may not have been such a watershed after all: the law doesn’t protect Will from getting beaten up by a gang of skinheads for being a ‘fuckin’ poof’ and, worse, a ‘fuckin’ nigger-fucker’; one of his friends is arrested for soliciting by a policeman ...”

“... private conversations over oil and gas deals in Eurasia. Or both. You never know with Baker, who may be representing his law firm, Baker Botts, which represents Halliburton; or Baker Hughes, the oil services company that was promised the second tier of oil-field restoration contracts in Iraq after Halliburton’s engineering and construction subsidiary ...”

“... with US breakfast TV. If George Bush can pretend for four months that he has Iraq under control he may well be re-elected. If disasters from Iraq continue to dominate the front pages he will probably lose. In April 125 soldiers were killed: the White House needs to show voters that casualties are on the way down. The appointment of Allawi is itself a ...”

“... on his family coat of arms to bees; that mead doesn’t taste very nice; that Alexander the Great may have been mummified in honey, but then again he may not; that honey from bees which have been foraging in rhododendron flowers is poisonous; and that oxymel, a mixture of honey, water and vinegar, was said by one writer to ...”

“... the veneration she received from her own. Stott acknowledges that ‘negative views abound.’ It may have been ‘a matter of no light moment’, as Roberts reverently put it, ‘to bring the memory of Hannah More fairly before the world’ in 1834, but the More of 20th-century historiography was a hate-figure in the Thatcher ...”

“... he was martyred in Smyrna has suggested to some historians that ex-Jews among the Christians may have been returning to the Jewish fold to escape this worsening persecution. The rise of Christian communities, the sensational stories of their martyrs, and their hostility to Jews reflected, to some extent, the awkwardness of a new religion so deeply ...”

“... Margaret Thatcher quoted on the steps of 10 Downing Street on her first day as prime minister, 4 May 1979: ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony.’ Thatcher had just called on the queen and no doubt wrote the words as an aide-memoire on the short drive back through St James Park from Buckingham Palace. It is as ...”

“... of memoir, reportage and – for want of a better way of putting it – travel writing. It may be tempting to see some significance in his recent turn to fiction, but perhaps this is to underestimate the porousness of the membranes between different kinds of writing. ‘By the time you’re writing memoir,’ Raban said in a recent ...”

“... Americans still supported Social Security, they still trusted the federal government. Reaganism may have brought the country back from post-Watergate malaise and disillusionment, but liberals would surely be back in power soon. In his new book, however, Reeves acknowledges that the Reagan era changed American political life seemingly for ever, by exalting ...”

“... and is immediately carried headlong downstream. The context for humans’ experience of the world may be presented in this unillusioned way, but the poem is not unrelievedly bleak. Farmers may not be living in the Garden of Eden, but they are not living in the moral corruption of the city either, and Virgil conveys an ...”

“... him in return; and, finally, possessed the offending quarto of the Essays and Treatises (which may or may not have been handsome). ‘Of all this,’ Boswell wrote, ‘I disapproved.’ We are thus thrown back at the text, to use the cant academic word, and Sher’s argument begins to sound a little strained. Are the ...”

“... environment not otherwise deemed to have colour. The ocean in which these arbitrary islands float may in principle be white – that, famously, has been the ideal for interiors where Modernist art is displayed. Or, more likely, in the cooler design manners of recent years, something less absolute – creams, cloud-greys, the self-effacing neutralities of MDF ...”