“... of some financial economists has been more clearly performative. Fischer Black, Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton’s Nobel Prize-winning option pricing equation of 1973 – which I described two years ago as ‘the single most important breakthrough in the modern mathematical theory of finance’* – didn’t originally describe the market prices of ...”

“... well. Honigmann argues that Shakeshafte was Shakespeare, and that he might have passed from the service of Hesketh into the household of Henry Stanley, Earl of Derby. There he might have met the core of the theatrical company which was to become the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. There is at present a large industry surrounding this line of inquiry, and it goes ...”

“... could possibly identify. But apart from being evasive, this is inept. In the film The Fog of War, Robert McNamara presents the first of his 11 rules of war: ‘Empathise with the enemy.’ Suicide bombing kills far fewer people than conventional warfare; the reactions it provokes must, therefore, reside somewhere other than in the number of the dead. It ...”

“... meticulous. At one end of the spectrum lurk the sex murderers in The Comfort of Strangers (1981), Robert and Caroline, whose actions lead their victim’s girlfriend to surmise that ‘the imagination, the sexual imagination’, embodies ‘a powerful single organising principle’ which distorts ‘all relations, all truth’. The incestuous children in The ...”

“... From here Donne inched his way towards preferment. He became an MP, and found favour with Sir Robert Drury, who took him to France and the Low Countries in 1611-12. Absence always worked powerfully on Donne’s imagination, and according to Izaak Walton, his friend and first biographer, he had a vision while on this trip: ‘I have seen my dear wife pass ...”

“... to secure a favourable settlement from the Commissioners for Compounding, he later gave valuable service to the Stuarts in exile and was rewarded at the Restoration with the lucrative post of Treasurer to the household of the Duke of York. At one stage he was actively involved in the suppression of conventicles. Though it is not impossible that ...”

“... over a new winter of discontent, with the Government’s management of everything from the health service and cattle disease to public transport under fierce popular scrutiny. John Prescott, with his two Jaguars and his immense self-satisfaction, became an obvious target for embittered travellers, but the gross strategic error was the failure to make ...”

“... into the part-wrapped nave.If the parishioners of 1730 came to St George’s today, much of the service would be familiar, but the coloured vestments and the larger number of active participants – a priest, an assistant, two or three servers – taking part in the Eucharist would reveal to them the effect of the moves which, from the middle of the 19th ...”

“... ranks of his own party’s beleaguered moderates, an apostate because of his endorsement of gay service in the military, abortion rights and even the legalisation of marijuana for medical purposes. The New Right had moved way past its founding father. Goldwater was a man before his time, but barely. He was trounced in the 1964 election, going down to one of ...”

“... rule. Vansittart thought that he viewed events ‘with the detachment of a choirboy at a funeral service’. Almost alone among politicians, he was indifferent to what his colleagues, the public or posterity thought of him or his policies. He kept no diary, made no attempt to preserve his papers. His sloth was legendary too. He seldom appeared before 11 ...”

“... for the egalitarian dynamism of the US, which he first visited in 1870. His idealism about public service, and his thirst for deserved fame, also made him hanker after a career in British politics, as the highest calling of the learned patriot. In any case, he failed throughout the 1870s to make a great success of the bar. He was trying to juggle legal ...”

“... elite women – by depriving them of education, exercise and opportunities for public or military service, keeping them mostly confined to the house, marrying them as young as possible, and trying to ensure that they were almost always under the legal control of a male guardian – unless they also assumed that if they did not do so things might get far too ...”

“... a small horde of Belle Epoque celebrities – everybody from Pierre Louÿs, Mata Hari and Comte Robert de Montesquiou, to Gide, Colette, Rémy de Gourmont, Paul Valéry, Sacha Guitry, Salomon Reinach and the buxom brunette diva Emma Calvé. (It was de Gourmont who nicknamed Barney ‘L’Amazone’, the monicker under which she would publish three books of ...”

“... her Catriona; would that be all right by me? I was very happy about it. We were both admirers of Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped was really our favourite, but we couldn’t call our daughter David, or name her after Alan Breck. She’d have to be named for the sequel.Like all my contemporaries, in those first years when the contraceptive pill was widely ...”

“... of exclusion by seeking to exclude his excluders in retaliation. Wanting, in the psychoanalyst Robert Stoller’s phrase, to ‘turn trauma into triumph’, the tragic hero tries to turn the tables. Being left out begins as tragedy, and tragedy, Freud suggests, is integral to development. So the developmental question – the moral question – is this: is ...”