“... murder earlier this year. How did we come to this? In Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder, David Healy goes back to the Greeks and Romans in search of an explanation. There are good reasons for this. Very few people had heard of bipolar disorder before 1980, when it was introduced in the DSM-III – the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric ...”

“... into fire – more, certainly, than the government expected. It is thus an opportune moment for David Miers to publish Regulating Commercial Gambling, a legal history of how we got where we are. Miers and his colleague David Dixon are probably the two leading authorities on the legal history of British gambling, and this ...”

“... by Robert Merton: ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.’ David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old, with its ironic echoes of bestsellers by Robert Hughes and Alvin Toffler, is not an attack on innovation as such. Rather, it is a call for a new way of thinking about technological change, not as a sequence of ...”

“... follows instructions, success isn’t guaranteed. Asked to bring the bat from the closet – Molly means the baseball bat – she returns bearing a soft toy with leathery wings. Molly’s confrontation with the intruder is narrated in short sections that alternate with equally short sections, flashing back a matter of hours to her day at work, where similarly ...”

“... often assumed to be the stooges of their fathers or husbands, painting before an audience was a means of demonstrating autonomy. In May 1664, Cosimo, Grand Prince of Tuscany, joined the visitors who packed into Elisabetta Sirani’s studio in Bologna to watch her paint a breastfeeding scene. Having established the first secular art school for girls after ...”

“... gets blown up. Maybe Brookner’s view, which holds, like Thomas Mann’s, that to be a writer means dying to ordinary life, is less discouraging. Wolf’s Kleist feels something of this kind, but struggles at the boundaries between ideas and writing and life. Boundaries are important, too, in connecting these novels, since they are concerned with ...”

“... Kadavergehorsam, which the dictionary translates as ‘blind obedience’, but which literally means ‘obedience unto death’. Sometimes this archetypally German conformity has a surreal touch. A Czech colleague once told me that on a research visit to Leipzig he had seen a street-cleaning van sprinkling away during a rainstorm. At that moment, he told ...”

“... speaking, the world would still be a matter of creation even if it had no origin. Creation means that God’s love sustains it in being, not that he threw it together some aeons ago in a fit of false optimism. The imagination is thought by some Romantics to be like God because it transcends all partial viewpoints, but is able at the same time to enter ...”

“... first deployed by the Soviet navy almost sixty years ago, and were targeted by very basic means, relying on the merchant ships’ own tracking beacons, the Automatic Identification System (AIS) used by all commercial ships to broadcast their location. Despite the technological imbalance, the US navy lost the battle, as revealed in a detail omitted ...”

“... Paul Fussell described how – at the age of 20 – he became a full-time ironist: one who, by means of his experience in combat, had learned to perceive ‘some great gulf, half-comic and half-tragic, between what one expects and what one finds’. And in his book The Great War and Modern Memory, the soldier poets and memoirists who featured most ...”

“... a very wide gateway to voluntarism. As Dr Kendall puts it, ‘believing in Christ to Perkins means sooner or later to descend inside ourselves; the eventual result is not merely introspection, but a doctrine of faith that could easily breed legalism.’ Our calling and election are made sure by the evidence of good works. This aspect of Perkins’s ...”

“... the behaviour of Macmillan in 1957, to mellow the criticism of the Russians in 1986, it is by no means an exact parallel. The fire at Windscale in 1957 was inside a massive concrete containment building into which it was possible to pump water. The Soviet facility is a totally different creature. Pouring water on the burning Soviet graphite moderator would ...”

“... with the language of painting. In the show at Tate Britain therefore, ‘painting set free’ means something like the opposite of what it meant for Gowing. The aim of the co-curators, David Blayney Brown, Amy Concannon and Smiles, is to set Turner’s last paintings free from what Brown calls the ‘reductive critical ...”

“... coaches and managers of the major world soccer teams, and all manner of celebrities, ranging from David Beckham to Charlize Theron. There has been much speculation about whether Diego Maradona will attend the draw. He has been banned from doing so after a recent foul-mouthed TV performance, judged to have brought the game into disrepute, but he is apparently ...”

“... organisms,’ he tells us, ‘there will be a tidal wave of new discoveries.’ Sam Harris means to circumvent survivalism by rooting his claims in something called ‘well-being’. Harris, who dabbles in neuroscience when he’s not saving the West from the threat of a new caliphate in the pages of the New York Times, believes that ‘questions about ...”