“... Chesterton knew that it was only by loving and serving God through his Church that perfect freedom may be found, so it was inevitable that in the cause of Liberty he also became a defender of the Faith ... The understanding of this seeming paradox must be the chief concern of any biography of Chesterton, for the expounding of it was the chief concern of his ...”

“... the grateful monarch would abdicate in his favour, can only be attributed to plain lunacy. Robert Darnton reports on the autobiography of an itinerant glazier, born in Paris in 1738, a low-life Lovelace who outstrips all the window cleaner/travelling salesman jokes with his 64 seductions. If Jacques Ménétra is so extensively successful that he seems ...”

“... out of London. In his journal, written on the empty pages of an old bankbook, he notes that on 23 May 1826 he walked to school: ‘Old Monk drinks like a fish.’ At 14 he feels it is ‘high time for me to be learning some trade or profession’, and at 15 he is alone at his father’s deathbed, holding ‘the cold clammy hand’. At 16 he ships for ...”

“... Cromwell gets 21 lines to himself plus a separate entry under Tudor Revolution in Government. This may indicate the administrative path to editorial favour, for A.V. Dicey’s academic writings on the 19th century state are rewarded with an entry of nine lines, the same as Lord John Russell who was merely in office at the time. This is three lines less than ...”

“... in which the corn negates the seed and so on, is owed directly or indirectly to him. All that may be thrown away, and only the demands of religious observance could want it kept. But along with it, logicians and their natural philosophical allies characteristically throw out an entire dimension of social, political and psychological thought: a dimension ...”

“... be). One of the things you might have to discover is that some virtues are against the grain: it may not feel real to you to say sorry, or to be grateful, for example.The upshot of all this is that adults who look after adolescents have both to want them to behave badly, and to try and stop them; and to be able to do this the adults have to enjoy having ...”

“... to the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees. (The convention states that asylum seekers may have to opt for unlawful departure from one country and unlawful entry into another and that this must not prejudice their claim.) But Labor has never been far behind the Coalition. In the 1990s Paul Keating’s administration introduced mandatory detention ...”

“... for a reduced sentence; those who insist on a trial will be assigned a public defender who may have only a few hours to prepare. The producer and director of Making a Murderer, by contrast, spent years studying one case. They provide no narrative voiceover, but present the words and images they have gathered as evidence for us to ...”

“... voluptuous rebirth.’ There aren’t many skeletons left in Hardwick’s closet. Since 1973, when Robert Lowell published The Dolphin, a series of sonnets based on Hardwick’s letters to him during the breakdown of their marriage, the story of her life has been bound up with, and contorted by, his overbearing presence. Cathy Curtis, author of the first ...”

“... disintegrated, no longer preparing for government, but for oblivion. Part of the SDP is to go with Robert MacLennan, a year ago unknown in Britain and today unknown throughout the world. The other part, under David Owen, is being re-launched as the political wing of Sainsbury’s. At the Labour Conference there was little rejoicing over the demise of the ...”

“... regarded this as its best effort was widely thought to be embarrassing. As the movie’s director Robert Zemeckis gave his speech of acceptance (which he did, excruciatingly, by speaking ‘on behalf of Forrest Gumps everywhere’), the girl seated next to Madonna, in the words of my colleague Frank DiGiacomo, ‘turned to the pop star and displayed the ...”

“... finding, in 1953, that the transfer of a Chinese philosophic-poetic concept into English ‘may very probably be the most complex type of event yet produced in the evolution of the cosmos’ would now strike one as hyperbolic but plausible. St Jerome is again claiming his place as patron of letters. The sources of this change are various; and engage the ...”

“... documents from the very end of the tsarist period which tells the story of Nicholas’s last days. Robert Massie’s The Romanovs: The Final Chapter tells what happened to the Romanovs after they died. Massie’s book is a movie, big on atmosphere and set pieces, while Steinberg and Khrustalev’s book is a book, as dense with information as an old ...”

“... Hollar. As Kate Bennett writes in the introduction to her superb new edition of Brief Lives, ‘we may be able to hear, through him, the 17th century talking to and about itself.’ What do we hear? We hear that William Petty teaches anatomy at Brasenose and keeps a partially pickled body as a teaching prop, ferried to Oxford from Reading. That Thomas Hobbes ...”

“... cleansing’, with its suggestion that nothing more than a routine housekeeping task is involved. Robert Bevan begins his book with an account of his childhood obsession with photographs and film footage of the destruction of Europe’s built heritage in World War Two, an obsession that ‘felt wrong’ in relation to the ‘greater evil’ also available for ...”