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“... The unnamed narrator of John Banville’s novel is an academic who spends the summer on a run-down country estate in Ireland where he hopes to put the finishing touches to a book on Isaac Newton. Gradually, his research takes a back seat as he becomes fascinated with the family on whose property he is living. Edward Lawless is a wreck of a man, clumsy, inarticulate, frequently drunk; his wife Charlotte is noble, suffering, strangely withdrawn; Ottilie, Charlotte’s niece, is blonde, somewhat graceless, but physically available ...”

“... is the rule of law. The Enlightenment taught that Nature itself worked by clear and invariable laws, and saw no reason why human society should not do the same. Much that was wrong with existing institutions could be explained in these terms, and when the French Revolutionaries set out to build a new order from its foundations, they proclaimed the rule of ...”

“... he left his second wife and children in 2000, and he has made several public appearances in drag.) John McCain has shown himself to be unreliable on terror with his liberal-sounding objections to torture at Guantánamo and is too friendly to illegal immigrants. With Mitt Romney, it’s hard to know which is the more off-putting: that he served as governor of ...”

“... in general. The past itself is alterable, since the future casts it in a new light. Whether John Milton belonged to a species which ended up destroying itself is up to us and our progeny. The future possibilities of Hamlet are part of the play’s meaning, even though they may never be realised. One of the finest English novels, Samuel Richardson’s ...”

“... act that avoids the twin perils of a meaningless existence and a chance death; and thinkers from John Donne to Schopenhauer have mounted various lines of defence. But in general, as Philippe Ariès argued in The Hour of Our Death, we now generally treat death not as the ultimate test of our courage or convictions, but as the inevitable and unpleasant ...”

“... League, with the title ‘How Not to Translate Marx’. The translator he had in mind was John Broadhouse, a pseudonym for the journalist Henry Mayers Hyndman, who was notorious both for his socialism and his pronounced antisemitism (he once said of Marx’s daughter Eleanor that she ‘inherited in her nose and mouth the Jewish type from Marx ...”

“... function. The problem particularly afflicts Americans who, taking advantage of lax gun-control laws, tend to buy whatever they think they need to defend themselves. But as the danger recedes, they frequently forget about the lethal arsenals they have accumulated. Stored carelessly in closets and sock drawers, an appalling number of rifles, shotguns and ...”

“... and bicycles, seems to mark the dawn of civilised modernity. He led the crusade against the Corn Laws – the notorious ‘bread tax’ of 1815, a tariff on imports designed to subsidise the British farmer – and campaigned for peace and disarmament, cheap newspapers and the penny post. He is a worthy subject for canonisation. Anthony Howe’s ...”

“... valedictory was more polemical: a demolition of those historians who seek in history for immutable laws and inevitable outcomes. With irresistible case Trevor-Roper demonstrates that though there are tendencies in history, there is also the working of accidents which change the course of history and could not have been foreseen. What would have ...”

“... designs, sober covers and superior typography (hangovers, as Morpurgo demonstrates, from John Lane’s Bodley Head). The Penguin aura was of solid, durable literature and (as Pelicans) sensible discussion. To work the paradox to death, one might claim that Penguins were paperbacks which, for most of their history, successfully passed themselves off ...”

“... and started a great flood of work by others which has not ceased with his death. Along with John Rawls, he initiated the vastly influential tradition within analytic philosophy of substantive moral exploration of major public issues, bringing high standards of clarity, rational argument and lucid expression to questions that matter to many more people ...”

“... because its obtaining makes reality as full and varied as it could be, or because its fundamental laws are, in some way, as elegant as they could be. Presumably there are other such features, which I have overlooked.In claiming that there are credible Selectors, I am assuming that some cosmic and explanatory possibilities are more probable than others. That ...”

“... contact with London than with one another. When the First Continental Congress convened in 1774, John Adams reported that the delegates were ‘strangers’, unfamiliar with each other’s ideas and experiences. What then explains the road to independence? While most accounts of the coming of the Revolution focus on protests in eastern cities against British ...”

“... John Taylor, the journalist, newspaper editor and poet, was born in 1757. His grandfather, the legendary ‘Chevalier’ Taylor, had been oculist to George II, and afterwards, so his grandson assures us, to ‘every crowned head in Europe’. He was as famous for his womanising as for his knowledge of ophthalmology, but most famous, perhaps, for his habit of prefacing every operation he performed with a long speech in praise of his own skill, composed in what he claimed was ‘the true Ciceronian’, with each main verb cunningly held back to the end of the sentence ...”

“... value-laden and partial. The second, more penetrating objection was that the aspiration to devise laws and public policies that were neutral towards competing conceptions of the good life was itself not neutral but rather affirmed the good of individual choice. By seeking to remain neutral, the state (and teachers, parents, friends and so on) gave wide ...”