“... the service from sixth mate, and had been captain of the Abergavenny since 1801. Like his brother Richard, who became a lawyer, and unlike his brother William, who became a poet, John needed to make a living in a gentlemanly job, and began his sea career immediately after leaving Hawkshead Grammar School. It may have been a ...”

“... of food vouchers worth £35 a week. ‘Many asylum seekers come from communities where wealth may be stored in jewellery,’ explains the Home Office minister Mike O’Brien, ‘and it is right for us to take account of that wealth.’ ‘Is the minister suggesting,’ asks Diane Abbott MP, ‘that asylum seekers should sell their jewellery, perhaps their ...”

“... because you can never tell, and both the Arab unity and the Muslim-Jewish co-operation he sought may always have been chimerical. That said, Anderson concludes, ‘it’s hard to imagine that any of this could possibly have produced a sadder history than what has actually transpired over the past century, a catalogue of war, religious strife and brutal ...”

“... of the Cold War it is time to start again. None of the old assumptions applies any longer. Russia may be difficult to deal with but it is not an enemy: we have relatively normal relations with it. The US now has strategic nuclear primacy over Russia: its chances of disabling Russian nuclear forces with a first strike are estimated at more than 90 per ...”

“... with folk or even fairy tale in ways that are not easy to sort out. Peele’s questing knight may primarily evoke the world of romance, but that is not his only habitat. Jack, and the maidens at the well, certainly suggest folk tale but without being confined to it. Delia, Venelia, the were-bear and the magician Sacrapant who persecutes them could be ...”

“... not uncommon, of that boundary becoming blurred or even disappearing, an experience that may hold a clue to the feeling, also not uncommon, that Wagner’s work is in some sense not altogether good for us.Respecting boundaries was not Wagner’s thing. Transgression he took in his stride – stealing other men’s wives when he needed them, spending ...”

“... week. 15 April. I have given all my literary archive to the Bodleian Library and this afternoon Richard Ovenden, the keeper of special collections, comes round to load up the hundred or so box files and take them to Oxford. There will be more in due course, including all my notebooks and the annotated copies of the printed stuff, but I’m very happy to see ...”

“... quelled religious enthusiasm in Europe. If national identities grow weaker, religious identities may harden and long-forgotten disputes re-ignite. Evangelical religion thrives on population mobility and social change: the frontierless European Community and the newly-liberated countries of Eastern Europe may both prove ...”

“... aplomb in the world. As the recent chairman of Did you see? he smoothly concealed any distaste he may have felt for the more freakish performers on his viewing panel; and as the one-time pillar of Panorama he was not too pompous to play himself in Yes, Prime Minister and ask questions about the British sausage. His life has been pitched at an agreeable social ...”

“... like naughty English choirboys and girls of the 1940s. Can Modern Baptists be true to life? We may hope so. Carl Robert Pickens is occasionally called Bobby, but more often Mr Pickens, in a Dickensian, Pickwickian way. He has many problems. He has just been sacked from his job as assistant manager at the Sonny Boy Bargain Store in Tula Springs – partly ...”

“... that these emotions are central is not to say that they are the most often felt; their centrality may lie in the strength of our desire to avoid them. William Miller’s suggestion has a creeping plausibility – in the playground, among teenagers, among mid-life colleagues, in the retirement home. It has a serious claim to express a human universal, valid ...”

“... podium’, but he was prepared to give the Hitler salute. A long-standing friend of Gadamer’s, Richard Kroner, taught philosophy at Kiel. In 1934, Gadamer reports, ‘fate intervened to throw Kroner off track’: that is to say, Kroner was sacked because he was a Jew. Gadamer took his job. Despite this little success, further balancing acts were still ...”

“... its importance more or less in direct proportion to the depth of the gloom it sheds. With luck we may one day look back on it as the last ‘English’ novel. It is the 1920s. Timothy Harcombe, the narrator, works with his father Clement, a faith-healer, at the Chemical Theatre in the City Road in London; his mother Cecilia died in giving him birth. Each ...”

“... if not inevitabilities’ at the heart of organic evolution, and biological possibility may, because of ‘physical constraints, be much more limited than is usually supposed’. Conway Morris states early on that he wants to ‘reopen the portals’ to find ‘a metaphysic for evolution’. His new approach, which he hopes might ‘at last allow a ...”

“... Michael Flood, Frederick Saxby, Valentine Fane, Griffiths Davies and so on: there were many – may yet turn out to be comrades from the trenches, those other persons he so loved. Although writing of place-names rather than people, P.J. Kavanagh puts the matter exactly in the introduction to his wonderful Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney (1982): ‘Like most ...”