“... over six pages of ‘A-14’. There are also passages from Heart of Darkness and allusions to the May 1963 marches in Birmingham, Alabama and the September bombing of a Baptist church in which four black children were killed. Then there are the semantically dense clusters, like this one from ‘A-23’: Cue in new – old quantities – ‘Don’t Bother ...”

“... conception of the authority of science, as well as a refusal to deny the reality of the mental. He may have been a systematic philosopher, but that does not mean that certain ideas could not be detached from his system. One thing which might be worth detaching is the scientia mensura itself. This idea receives remarkably little discussion in the essays in this ...”

“... in them. Berlusconi is our own Kung Fu Panda. As the Marx Brothers might have put it, ‘this man may look like a corrupt idiot and act like a corrupt idiot, but don’t let that deceive you – he is a corrupt idiot.’ To get a glimpse of the reality beneath this deception, call to mind the events of July 2008, when the Italian government proclaimed a state ...”

“... in the 14th century: ‘The truth … is that no such people do exist as nations, though there may be an individual monster here and there.’ For Hobbes the cannibal was a very useful part of his thought experiment. The war of all against all would be at its most virulent where pre-social individuals ate each other when they met. And they ...”

“... degree exploiting her youth and unmarried status to ask naive questions and elicit richer answers may have made her particularly sensitive to the way her woman informants had used ‘ignorance’ to their own advantage. If Beier, in the end, tells us a familiar story – mothers had power, and they lost it – Fisher gives us something more complex and ...”

“... the fact that fewer than a quarter of historians in France work on the history of other countries may help explain Burguière’s restricted field of vision. Bloch and Febvre had many international connections and shared a broad, cosmopolitan vision. Bloch himself declared that historians should ‘base their plan, the treatment of the problems they ...”

“... Array, liked to assert that ‘in loving service to the soil, men see each season how death may be cheated and learn how they must always protect the sound seed from the weeds, and how close breeding makes fine types of stock.’ In other words, his ruralism entailed anti-semitism and eugenics. The High Tory Eliot kept his distance from these doctrines ...”

“... is accused of violence and carelessness, of all sorts of vicious, undermining antics, and things may have been so, but the letters are organised – unfairly? judiciously? – to make Bellow seem the moral victor in all of this. The only reason we are reading one side of this sad exchange is that Bellow was the famous writer and these are his letters: they ...”

“... by four large cases of heavily insured books’ – returned to Kirkcaldy in May 1767, where he would remain until 1773. Here, living quietly with his mother, and with his chief amusement ‘long, solitary walks’ by the sea, Smith drafted The Wealth of Nations. It might seem confining, if not smothering, for a middle-aged man of ...”

“... great pleasure is to be found in this web of connections: how the birth of one of his children may have helped to shape the birth scenes in Oliver Twist or David Copperfield, how his revulsion at Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents fuelled an article attacking the Pre-Raphaelites in general, or just why that Megalosaurus ‘would have been fresh ...”

“... the structures that sustain our law-abiding bourgeois lives, it becomes entwined with and may eventually end up both inhabiting and inverting those structures. This is clearly the case in Sicily and Mexico, but it’s also in its own small way the case here, in this office in a dull Northern town. There’s a huge bottle of champagne on the ...”

“... not the best of losers). His refusal to quit Number Ten after the February 1974 election may not have been quite as deplorable as Gordon Brown’s recent carry-on, which would have made a limpet blush. Heath, after all, had secured more votes nationally than Wilson and had only four fewer MPs. Yet his behaviour imprinted the image of a lousy loser ...”

“... start again, only to abandon this second attempt. A third attempt in 2000 gives way to a fourth in May 2002, which I put aside after three months and do not pick up again until October 2004, when my daughter returns from a trip to Madagascar with a little dictionary of Créole. In it I find the nursery rhyme which appears in the opening chapter: Waï, waï, mo ...”

“... crowd, figuring that they couldn’t tell one Chinese from another.) Madame Chiang’s charisma may have been dazzling – especially to Americans unfamiliar with the way her husband ran his regime – but she was not an ‘empress’, despite the title of Hannah Pakula’s book. Her authority was minimal compared to the true last empress, the Dowager ...”

“... given the honour of making the first toast: Glass in hand, I rose, and said something like: ‘May all our devices explode as successfully as today’s, but always over test sites and never over cities.’ The table fell silent, as if I had said something indecent. Everyone froze. [Deputy Minister of Defence, Marshal Mitrofan] Nedelin grinned and, rising ...”