“... His last words are supposed to have been ‘Ah well, I suppose it has come to this,’ though he may have said, as he does, ‘in a low tone’, on the last page of Carey’s novel: ‘Such is life.’ To his supporters, either would have been evidence of the sang-froid of a martyr; to the judge who sentenced him, proof of the cold blood of an unrepentant ...”

“... seem laziness itself.’ Leonardo’s belief in the inevitability of pictorial self-exposure may explain why no self-portrait by him is recorded, as well as the reason for his difficulties in completing work. He was searching neurotically for a perfection beyond personal idiosyncrasy. He wouldn’t have approved of a recent contention that the Mona Lisa ...”

“... whereas boys who carry knives into the playground are likely to be reported to the police. This may be wise, but the boys with knives understand something about war that the boys with model soldiers don’t: war is an intimate business. Some of the nastiest things happen close up, between individuals. Sometimes they don’t involve weapons. At dinner ...”

“... REFA together and Maudling actively touted its fraudulent prospectus to his contacts. Poulson may have been a crook but after just one look at the REFA brochure he threw it away and took care to distance himself from this transparent scam. Next, one finds Maudling involved with Sir Eric Miller, he of the Wilson honours list and endless crooked ...”

“... for searching in the archives for those who have been overlooked. Social and cultural historians may recoil from this, but it seems reasonable to read O’Brien’s self-confessed ‘elitism’ as a response to the prejudices of his peers. This book is a rebuke to those who doubt the existence of ‘clever people’ in the South, either in the antebellum ...”

“... considered science, as Conant writes, ‘a higher calling’. His grandson said that ‘while he may have been born a WASP, he didn’t think that way.’ An ardent Anglophile, as the saying is, Loomis dressed British, but tried to think Yiddish. He retired from Wall Street because, his daughter-in-law observed, he ‘just totally lost interest in ...”

“... and startling ways, are worth more than a thousand words, but words must accompany them. It may well be that the importance of the photographs of the Vietnam War has been overemphasised, so that it sometimes seems as if they alone brought the war to an end. If this is indeed the society of the spectacle then mere exposure to more and more images will ...”

“... that we have a Republican president spending madly on controversial and dangerous causes, history may well be kinder to Clinton. History is unlikely, however, to look more kindly on Kenneth Starr and the people who kept him going, or on the other members of the much touted right-wing conspiracy that devoted huge amounts of time and money to trying to bring ...”

“... clinic was notorious for cruelly ingenious contrivances to control and ‘cure’ the insane. By May the following year, Autenrieth, having concluded that Hölderlin’s illness was incurable, and assuming that he had at most three years to live, released him into the care of Ernst Zimmer, a local carpenter. Zimmer inhabited what had been part of the old ...”

“... take into account the dialectical totality of the situation.’ The singularity of human suffering may reach a level at which the easy reference to totality turns into cynicism. The only argument for the war against Iraq was repeatedly put by Christopher Hitchens: the majority of Iraqis were victims of Saddam and were glad to get rid of him. To this ...”

“... will rather note the vicar who loves Christ but can’t love God. But newcomers to Powys-land may wonder what the fuss is about. The last chapter of John Cowper’s Autobiography has the strange heading ‘There’s a Mohawk in the Sky!’ Is it a man, is it a bird? Is Powysianism a cult, a fan-club, a Welsh academic festival? Let us turn to Recollections ...”

“... who had written them, and that he had no sense of self-criticism, ever. Hardy’s turn to verse may be the most interesting event in his life during these years, but it is not a major subject in his letters. Here neither literature nor life concerns him much: his principal subjects are business and health. It is interesting, for a little while, to see what ...”

“... basket cases of the Queen Anne period. It would have been impossible for Swift, however much he may have sympathised with those hapless victims of nature’s malignity and man’s exploitative instincts, to understand their feelings, let alone convey them. The growing concern for suffering humanity in the next two centuries seldom extended to freaks, who ...”

“... his scientists’. Harrington’s sensible suggestion that legislators should assume that citizens may be wicked is taken as an assertion of original sin. But Dr Davis has illuminating things to say about Harrington’s ‘basically federal’ system of government, in which the municipal boroughs were ‘absorbed into the county’, and about his deference to ...”

“... many older folk in the village, apart from Nan Shepherd. She had taught my mother, whose name was May Salmond, between 1950 and 1953 at Aberdeen Training Centre, where students were ‘trained’ to be teachers. The general method of instruction conformed to the norms of the 1950s classroom: students were addressed like children, desks were laid out in rows ...”