“... still only 33 years old and has another 44 years to go; no doubt they will be less action-packed, more sedate – containable, one hopes, in only one more volume. Yet although Haffenden does, here and there, provide copious information on matters of rather marginal interest, his book justifies its length by supplying a mass ...”

“... of such sentiments in February 1793, a few weeks after the execution of Louis XVI, seemed to have more than mere philosophical speculation in mind. The Enquiry was discussed by Pitt’s cabinet in May, but although the book might have been expected to encounter the full force of the law – as Paine’s similarly argued Rights of Man (1791) had done two years ...”

“... To my surprise, he was delighted with that. Yes, a love-child he was. As I got to know more about his background, I began to see what he meant. His father and mother, both fiercely independent characters, ‘married at leisure but repented in haste’, as he put it. They quarrelled and parted within months of the ceremony and Karl was born at ...”

“... the least worst choice from a pack of bizarre characters seemingly drawn from reality TV shows or Thomas Pynchon novels, but he’s not finding much love, even at his own coronation. Only 27 per cent of Americans think that he’s a ‘likeable’ guy. (Obama gets 61 per cent.) On television he projects a strange combination of self-satisfaction and an ...”

“... and went to school in Lüneburg. In short he was, like Will, an exotic, and played to the fact. More important, he had been educated, to the limit of his father’s shabby genteel means, in the German Romantics. He was also, in youth, extremely handsome and could have slipped comfortably into any number of Victorian novels. His experience of public life was ...”

“... texts, and the effect is of a kind of memory or haunting: of a book remembering its origins. Thomas Nashe imagined his printed pages being used to wrap expensive slippers (‘velvet pantofles’), ‘so they be not … mangy at the toes, like an ape about the mouth’. As Leah Price showed recently in How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, we ...”

“... fashions on offer at the time: clapped-out Audenesque or a torrid Neo-Romanticism that had Dylan Thomas as its vaguely guiding force. Keith Douglas had no particular allegiance to either camp, although he was closer to Auden than to Thomas and had had a poem published in New Verse when he was still at school. But he was ...”

“... law is, in some ways’ at the vanishing-point of law, the law of war is, perhaps even more conspicuously, at the vanishing-point of international law.’ The remarkable thing is that Grotius’s remedy does exist. Despite the obvious obstacles to any form of humanity in warfare, there are modest but genuine successes in legislating for, and ...”

“... the rise of the women’s movement to the postmodern cult of the perverse, few themes have been more persistent in literature departments than sexuality. For most people, writing about multiple orgasms is known as pornography; in academia, it can win you a chair. Sexuality is not to be confused with sex. Sex is what most people do, whereas sexuality is ...”

“... occasionally licking the floor as they did so. Some men and women levitated (Catholics proved more proficient at the practice than Protestants); others threw the process into reverse, gaining so much weight that they were impossible to budge. A late 17th-century German demoniac is reputed to have coughed up four hundred chamberpots’ worth of blood. Some ...”

“... of the threat posed by ‘the man’ (unnamed until later) the novel begins as explosively as Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, where Michael Henchard puts his wife up for sale. Eilis understands where the man is coming from, as if his belligerence were a tribal norm: ‘She had known men like this in Ireland. Should one of them discover that ...”

“... Lassie, we could do it without being suspected of trying for the popular touch; if we came across Thomas Aquinas, we wouldn’t have to pretend we found the thought in an old cookbook. This may sound utopian (or nightmarish: chacun son dégoût), but that is the point: the ease of unassorted reference, the sense of play continuing where seriousness would have ...”

“... number (divisors 14, 7, 4, 2, 1), and 28 arguments for the existence of God might have been more than enough. But 36 is a perfect number of perfect numbers: a perfect square, and it’s twice 18, a deeply lucky number according to the Kabbalistic ‘gematria’ system of assigning numerical values to Hebrew letters (the letters of chai, the Hebrew for ...”

“... what is now Serbia. His far better-known contemporary Augustine of Hippo praised the psalms in more flamboyant terms:How loudly I cried out to you, my God, as I read the psalms of David, songs full of faith, outbursts of devotion with no room in them for the breath of pride! … How loudly I began to cry out to you in those psalms, how I was inflamed by ...”

“... kill each other. In most murder fictions these dark pleasures are overlaid by other, superficially more respectable, kinds of interest. Murder fictions let us test our hypotheses about how and why people act. They may also suggest that the things we do when we read most narratives – forming inferences, seeking intelligibility, constructing hypotheses that ...”