“... The antiquity of this figure is the subject of a very learned and also very amusing book by Robert Merton; the received wisdom is that it goes at least as far back as the 12th century. So there is nothing very modern about worrying about what it means to be modern, and even if you think that being modern requires a total rejection of the past, like ...”

“... said during his final trial: ‘He hath been as a star at which the world hath gazed; but stars may fall, nay they must fall when they trouble the sphere wherein they abide.’ During his life Ralegh built up a reputation for fabulous wealth and bad behaviour that persisted well after his death. In the late 17th century, John Aubrey (who was good on ...”

“... is hiding in the school. His identity papers are forged, and deportation to the death camps may await him if he is caught. His attention, however, is not on the dangers outside but on a mathematics lesson. When he first started taking the classes, ‘he sat uncomprehending before the meaningless words and numbers on the blackboard.’ Today, though, a ...”

“... to Bathe Your New Baby’ v. ‘Win the Chance to Pole-Dance with Pamela!’ – it may be time to consider whether these men’s magazines aren’t just the latest enlargement on the old fantasy of men having everything they want to have and finding a way to call it their destiny. Stag & Groom Magazine is edited by a woman who has no end of ...”

“... Well, he has always been envious of Eliot, and if The Old Man’s Road is no 4 Quartets it may be, in a nasty sort of way, his Ash Wednesday (why should the aged beagle stretch its legs, he yawned, scratching himself with his singing bone) … The poems are probably also the expression of a periodic self-disgust (another instance is the kind of ...”

“... man’ – the learning of the lesson was itself a form of defiance and an aid to survival. I may be an ‘intellectual’ today, even though the word fills me with vague discomfort; I certainly was not one then, because of moral immaturity, ignorance and alienation; and if I became one later on, paradoxically, I owe that precisely to the Lager ...”

“... inherent in the concept of a canon must be jettisoned.’ It is how he is able, in a piece about Robert Mapplethorpe, to argue that ‘passion, like art, is always irresponsible, useless, an end in itself, regulated by its own impulses and nothing else’ and to propose in another that the best gay writing should be a combination of confession, reportage and ...”

“... her ‘the rough draught of a certain famous line in the “Characters of Women” ’. Woolf may have intended her mock-biography as an affectionate portrait of Vita Sackville-West, but Isobel Grundy is surely right in thinking that these episodes in Orlando’s career were primarily inspired by the life and letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Of ...”

“... supposed threat to traditional religion. What made it different was the leadership of the lawyer Robert Aske, leadership of a kind which had been lacking in Lincolnshire. For Aske had charisma and, it appears, boundless personal ambition. It was Aske who invented the logo ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’, declaring himself ‘chief captain’ of the Pilgrimage, and ...”

“... or the revelations of his doctor. Biographers have always had a difficult time with Chiang, which may explain why there have been so few of them; Madame Chiang was always much better copy, as we were reminded in her obituaries last year. Early pictures of Chiang at Dr Sun’s side, and as commander of the Whampoa military academy where he built the ...”

“... of the Guildford Four are a politically heterogeneous bunch: at one end, Cardinal Basil Hume, Robert Kee, Merlyn Rees, Lord Scarman and the late Lord Devlin; at the other, rhetoric-ridden, far-left Trotskyist groupings. And in between the world and its dog. The only thing on which all are agreed – some with more knowledge of the facts than others – is ...”

“... and forming the Moon from the debris produced by the impact. Collisions between large bodies may also be responsible for altering the rotation of Venus, which takes longer to spin on its axis than it does to orbit the Sun and hence has a day longer than its year; for the surprising density of Mercury, which may once ...”

“... sake the choice of assumed name should be arbitrary and inscrutable. In some cases, there may be the good reason that the author has something important to lose if he’s recognised. Patrick Mann’s novels (Steal Big, Dog Day Afternoon) carry the front-cover information that ‘Patrick Mann is the pseudonym of a former US Army Intelligence agent who ...”

“... doesn’t, even though an obvious reason for wanting to gag people is the fear that not doing so may cause harm? Clearly, the prospect of such harm can be exploited to squelch opinions one doesn’t care to hear. But the fact that some people cite harm disingenuously doesn’t show that the preponderance of harm arises from a regime of gagging rather than ...”

“... 1945 – the Cold War standing in this case as both analogy and warning. In Return to Cold War, Robert Legvold – a specialist in post-Soviet foreign policy and regular contributor to Foreign Affairs – sees worrying similarities between the current situation and the early stages of the Cold War (c.1948-53), focusing in particular on the rhetorical ...”