“... pen, but for those more comfortable with plain writing in English, it began perhaps with William James deriding the ‘copy theory of truth’. This path has been increasingly followed of late; its most widely-read exposition is Richard Rorty’s pragmatism. The will to truth disappears, and is replaced by a desire for more or less satisfactory ...”

“... candidates for the roles of Brünnhilde and Siegfried, Tristan and Isolde, or Elektra: but now, as James Levine, the artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, has notoriously complained, it is very hard to assemble a cast even for Aida. Nobody quite knows why this should be so: it could be the fault of teaching, it could be the merest freak of ...”

“... its potential adversaries, as well as courses on how to pick a dead drop and how not to look like James Bond, Suvorov was posted to Vienna, to that self-contained section of the Soviet Embassy called the Residency, which is headed by a GRU major-general invariably called ‘the Navigator’. He, as we learn from Shevchenko, can occupy quite a humble place in ...”

“... in McTaggart or Bradley. He broke loose from Hegelianism with the help first of William James and then of Russell, Moore and Alexander. But unlike Russell, Anderson did not emerge from his Hegelianism determined to deny whatever Hegel had asserted and to assert whatever Hegel had denied. He continued to respect Hegel – who was himself an ...”

“... But he diverged from his imperial hosts on their free use of the word ‘nigger’, complaining to Lord Glanville that ‘because a man has a black face and a different religion from our own, there is no reason why he should be treated as a brute.’ This was a rare question on which he and his mother saw eye to eye. She too found it ‘dreadful how they treat ...”

“... was the scene of a ‘strange and recurring tragedy’ which provided the point of departure for James Frazer’s anthropological classic, The Golden Bough. The grove was guarded by a wary figure, a priest and a murderer, ever on his guard against an assailant who would try to murder him in order to take his place: ‘Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A ...”

“... conglomeration of slum housing, religious bigotry and urban decay’ – in the words of the lord provost of the time – to a place of gleaming post-industrial glamour. Gray’s fame and Glasgow’s upgrade came about at the same time, and are in lots of ways connected: Gray had a brief stint as professor of creative writing at Glasgow University, a ...”

“... it could be something private, hidden in a locket worn next to your heart. In his autobiography, Lord Herbert of Cherbury recounts how his admirer, Lady Ayres, had a full-size portrait of him ‘contracted into little form’, and wore it round her neck ‘so low that she hid it under her breasts’. Trouble ensued when her husband found her lying in ...”

“... book with the timely observation that ‘Warren Hastings was our first Governor-General in India. Lord Mountbatten is to be the last.’ Two other fellows of All Souls, both lawyers, also had reason to be interested in Hastings at the time: Cyril Radcliffe served on the Boundary Commission for India, while the egregiously indolent John Sparrow would shortly ...”

“... It began life as a dissertation written at Berkeley under the supervision of Thomas Laqueur and James Vernon, whose students have done so much to document the way neoliberalism shaped every aspect of British life – financial markets, town planning, culture, humanitarianism. (Sasson thanks Berkeley faculty and graduate students, and 52 ‘fellow travellers ...”

“... on literature produced by functionaries of the British Empire – Mungo Park on Central Africa, James Cook and Joseph Banks on the Pacific Islands, William Jones on India – and shared their assumptions about civilisational development. Progress was measured by the extent to which a society exploited its land efficiently, and by the relative predominance ...”

“... of licensing laws to become the city’s first all-night superclub. One of its founders, James Palumbo (the son of Conservative peer Peter Palumbo), occasionally lent his chauffeur-driven car to Peter Mandelson. He even pitched, unsuccessfully, that Ministry be adopted as the corporate sponsor of the Millennium Dome’s Faith Zone, on the grounds ...”

“... And there would be those who would resist invasion: Bob Dylan (now clearly revealed as the Henry James of our age) not least. But the scene was set. The place: the Factory, Warhol’s studio, on East 47th Street. The fuel: hard drugs, especially amphetamines. The project: to condense the history of metropolitan interiors into a slow home movie, based on ...”

“... without a substantial) rank and file, and this could hardly be recruited in such a way. Lord Hugh Cecil once pointed out that’a class is in its very idea a separate thing with common interests,’ whereas ‘sex is just the opposite. Sex is a body whose members are essentially interested in the members of the other sex.’ British feminist leaders ...”

“... 1788. It is the kind of subject that would inspire a less devious civilisation-chronicler like James Michener to epic slabs of narrative and at least two thousand pages, sweeping us from the formation of the continental land mass to Paul Hogan’s amber nectar ads. But Keneally habitually sidles into his big subjects, illuminating them indirectly by odd ...”