“... quo, whose resistance to change he despised. ‘We are an intensely conservative society,’ he said on the BBC in 1956, and ‘a class society, with marked social inequality … the obsession with the past, our heritage, not only softens some of the blows of the present but prevents us from tackling some of the present problems of our age … our grammar ...”

“... New’ poetry can mean two things. When Ezra Pound said ‘make it new’ he was willing the advent of Modernism, the birth of a consciousness transformed by the disintegrations and realities of the 20th century. But ‘new’ or ‘contemporary’ poetry refers more simply to changes in fashion, the growing up of new groups of designers and a new generation of consumers ...”

“... it with another, to the cock of his head and the play of his eyebrows and his wide mouth, which said much that he declined to put into words. But the thing I carried away at the end of two hours was the way his person, so focused and unhurried, and his style of thinking had fused over the previous thirty years. When we met I knew nothing about intelligence ...”

“... as he jumped out of a jeep at Los Alamos base camp. His friend and fellow physicist Isidor Rabi said: ‘I’ll never forget the way he stepped out of the car … his walk was like High Noon … this kind of strut. He had done it.’ His colleague Enrico Fermi ‘seemed shrunken and aged, made of old parchment’ by comparison. Yet his euphoria passed, and ...”

“... chaotic phenomenon is a poor model for the kinds of strategic intervention she advocates. Edward Lorenz, the originator of the butterfly trope, wasn’t asking us to imagine a remarkably clever insect calculating exactly how and when to flap its wings in such a way as to produce a storm in, say, Ipswich. The butterfly neither controls nor knows the ...”

“... hands are always the same. The second comes during ‘Molasses to Rum’, chillingly delivered by Edward Rutledge, the delegate from South Carolina who will not vote for independence until an anti-slavery clause is removed from the declaration. He leaps up on a table and becomes the auctioneer, the room goes red like something laid open, and this is the ...”

“... until at least the tenth century. The victory of Imam Asim over the local Buddhist regime is said to have taken place in the 12th century, but the distinctive forms of Islamic governance in the region can be dated to the arrival of Sufis of the Naqshbandi order in the late 14th or early 15th century. A combined system of temporal and spiritual power ...”

“... doubled and thousands of new staff had been hired. Many of the revelations in the papers leaked by Edward Snowden (which Kerbaj refers to as ‘stolen documents’) had to do with systems brought in for the new era of mass surveillance. The general scope of the established programmes had already been revealed by the brilliant work of the investigative ...”

“... One of his teachers, trying to explain what Wordsworth meant when he spoke of ‘trances’, is said to have referred him to Ramakrishna, a yogi at a nearby temple. In fact, curiosity about Ramakrishna was already widespread by the time of their first encounter in 1881. Even if the story is untrue, it captures Ramakrishna’s allure as a romantic rebel. A ...”

“... had forfeited that blessing.’ This took some nerve. Baxter remarks that he had thoughtfully said ‘monarchy’ rather than ‘King Charles’ for prudential reasons: ‘I was fain to speak of the species of government only, for they had lately made it treason by a law to speak for the person of the king.’ Really, C.H. Sisson ought to have appreciated ...”

“... these are among the topics considered in Getting and Spending, although in justice it has to be said that its substance is primarily devoted to the aggregate growth of that expenditure and to the fascinating recent history of attempts to plan and control it. But even if we make such allowances, the book provides only superficial answers to most of the ...”

“... Louvain. He disliked drinking with the college fellows, though, and was running into trouble with Edward Lee, who, despite his friendship with More, was becoming one of Erasmus’s harshest critics. In 1518 Erasmus left Louvain for Basle to see his revised New Testament through the press. Illnesses, quarrels, deaths, friendships ... life went on as ...”

“... ten minutes or so – or when you are going to trace an outline, to obtain the assistance of the said Prince … to hold up your tracing to the wall … it is very polite … but rather embarrassing.’ Albert couldn’t win. He was either a parasite or he interfered. When things went wrong he was blamed and Victoria was not unjustified in feeling that he ...”

“... only to be brought down by his political opponents on a charge of corruption. It used to be said that there was no connection between Bacon’s intellectual life and his public career. Macaulay set the pattern for this interpretation in an essay of 1837, in which he praised Bacon’s philosophy as forward-looking, but condemned his moral character and ...”

“... proven reality. It’s just silliness among the signifiers. Stevenson’s book is, it should be said in fairness, a massive gathering of painful erudition. He is like Denys the Alexandrian, who in Flaubert’s account received orders from heaven to read every book in the world. His head must be dizzy with the minor works of Julian Mitchell and Francis King ...”