“... greatest of all abilities is to be able to ‘draft around’ a problem. The Right to Know is much more than a good read and ephemeral wonder: it will, I believe, be required study for graduates, undergraduates, journalists and many others interested in the government of Britain. In particular, I am agog to know what the readers of the London Review are going ...”

“... seeks analogies between Germany’s experience and possible ways of recuperating the more or less unredeemed American past. What Nietzsche called ‘monumental’ history extracts from the past a particular great and worthy deed and uses it as a model: by showing that a thing was ‘at least possible once’ we see that it ‘may well again be ...”

“... duplication in the purchase of books. I also saw obvious practical problems with the scheme. More than a third of the Warburg library’s acquisitions come from gift or exchange, and most of the rest are bought with our own resources rather than public funds. And the institute has always made a practice of employing scholar-librarians, actively engaged ...”

“... the most important impact over the years on how we think and talk about law.’ Next to Clarence Thomas, Scalia is the most conservative justice on the Supreme Court. Kagan is a Democrat and, we’re told, a liberal. Was she including herself in this claim? If so, how exactly has Scalia influenced her? If not, what does she think of his influence on ...”

“... to knit again/This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf.’ Of course ‘scattered corn’ is far more likely to suggest the grain of Shakespeare’s native Warwickshire than the rare exotic his contemporaries called ‘Indian corn’ and while Griffiths’s identification of the other three figures as John Gerard, his patron Lord Burghley and his ...”

“... claim true. But it is a safe inference that his views on the question diverge from those of Thomas Jefferson. What, if anything, does make the claim simply true must be the rationally-interpreted place of human beings within the order (or disorder) of nature. If all human beings do simply have rights, that is to say, these rights must be natural ...”

“... was plenty of violence at a local level, and although no members of the family were killed it was more luck than circumstance that preserved them; a well-padded doublet proved useful even on the streets of Norwich. And the sentimentality, if not the sex, largely came second to economic considerations. The Pastons were minor Norfolk gentry who were doing their ...”

“... The fantasy Bergotte vanishes, but the caricature that replaces him is not intrinsically more ‘real’. Time radiates in two directions, or dimensions, from this encounter: as a mirage belonging to the past dissolves, knowledge from the future comes into play. The narrator, who will become Bergotte’s close friend, now tells us things about him ...”

“... language as such for its continuance. The idea of the language as something already recovered was more attractive than the immense labour of actually recovering it. The tendency to idolise as a national aspiration the recovery of something which successive government policies have managed to exterminate almost completely is peculiarly damaging both in itself ...”

“... counter-revolution, and instead approached liberal modernity by a detour, progressing quietly and more efficiently under the aegis of its otherwise irrational traditions and precedents. Variants of this national myth exert a grip far beyond the ranks of Eurosceptics: even among professional historians, the expression ‘English Enlightenment’ still offends ...”

“... of about two hundred and fifty words, though again there are days which take five or six times more than this to deal with. Was it all worth it? Though anxious not to give Mrs Castle the slightest encouragement to publish the diaries she is no doubt keeping as a Member of the European Parliament, I have to say that it was. For a total of some eight out of ...”

“... directed by techniques of quantification. The present title might lead one to expect essays more specifically on the ways in which historians think and operate, but in fact they all deal with historical, not with methodological topics. If we are to understand the mind and method of this historian, we need to extract them from what he has ...”

“... Cummins gives no information on his schooling. Camden, however, says: This Drake (to relate no more than what I have heart from himself) was born of mean Parentage in Devonshire, and had Francis Russel (afterwards Earl of Bedford) for his Godfather, who, according to Custome, gave him his christen name. Whilest he was yet a Child, his Father, imbracing the ...”

“... and I scribble each morning almost as if demented by years of fictional starvation. I feel like Thomas Mann when he spoke of the ‘passionate truancy’ of his political speeches and writings in opposition to Hitler: a truancy which aided rather than subtracted from his creative work. After eight years in rural Suffolk I was fed up with life as a ...”

“... ghostly self? At Elizabeth Jane Howard’s, the voice of the dearly departed couldn’t have been more distinctive. (By the way, is the departed a victim, as in a victim of death, or merely a passive recipient? Not to sound like an ad for Center Parcs, but does one suffer death, or is it just life’s ultimate experience?) Howard’s memorial was held at the ...”