“... Londoners have visited New York City, but what do we know of Albany? The citizens of Manhattan may tell us that Albany is a square, conservative place, snobbish about its Dutch origins and its tulip festival, and named after our least successful king, James II, when he was Duke of York and Albany. One year, when I told friends in Manhattan that I was going ...”

“... a TV series and a novel or a critical biography. One’s admiration for all this prudent industry may sometimes be tempered by a feeling that the product, efficient as it is, lacks aura, lacks the zest we associate with this writer in his more exuberant, less mechanical novels. His last novel-of-the-TV-series, The Kingdom of the Wicked, combines Acts and ...”

“... of stage props?’ Then he adds, a little sadly: ‘The only difference is that our predecessors may have truly believed. I cannot believe; I know too much.’ This confession gets at a major problem faced by contemporary doctors. The more effective their medical technology, the less faith they have in the power of their office. Doctors have come to believe ...”

“... part of this enterprise, and in Williams’s hands it becomes a subtle appreciation of ideas that may be fundamentally unlike anything we could think now, but that also help us to understand our own ideas better. Two of his best books were on historical subjects: Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry (1978) and Shame and Necessity (1993), a profound study of ...”

“... In a period of changing governments and political and economic instability Parliament itself may well have welcomed this anchorage, as ministers and policies came and went. Although in 1929 Lord Chief Justice Hewart (who had previously been a member of the Government as Attorney-General) published The New Despotism, fulminating at the impotence of the ...”

“... crude oil is ‘heavy’ and ‘sour’ – difficult and costly to extract and refine. This may explain why Trump has floated the idea of using US tax revenues to compensate oil companies for their trouble. But it also strongly implies that the oil companies weren’t pushing for this policy. The larger point to bear in mind is that, while there has ...”

“... spouses, trying not to irritate the performers with ‘hairsplitting Notes’. Play directors may come to suppose that everything can be done by Notes. When I was a student I appeared in a play by Michael Codron, directed by his friend, Adrian Brown: just before we went on, Codron appeared to give us a Note. ‘Adrian is making this too heavy and ...”

“... identical twins: Babies actually do get lost or separated, and, however rare such an event may be, when a person finds his twin it feeds the common fantasy that any one of us might have a clone, a doppelgänger; someone who is not only a human mirror but also an ideal companion; someone who understands me perfectly, almost perfectly, because he is ...”

“... theory. They are, as Paul Ricoeur says, ‘social poetry’, a poetry which, in the end, ‘may dissolve politics’. And like all poetry they reject precise literary definition. For the historian of political thought this poses quite serious definitional problems, problems which Krishan Kumar’s book does little to resolve. The Golden Age, the Land of ...”

“... to a friend: ‘The lonelier and the more isolated I am, the more I have come to love myths.’ We may puzzle over what Aristotle meant. Did he love folk-tales, religious stories or high-minded allegories? The Greek word mythos means (centrally) ‘story’ but all stories have or acquire meanings, and we tell ourselves stories all the time. A culture is the ...”

“... Several writers point out that in realistic applications the pursuit of utilitarian consequences may well require the abandonment of any attempt to apply utilitarianism very directly. It is not quite clear what the import of this is supposed to be: the editors clearly think it an embarrassment to the theory, while others, like Hare, find it a positive ...”

“... is famous for two things: her intense screen beauty and her many marriages (eight of them, two to Richard Burton). But at least as central to her life were her close and enduring friendships with men, some gay (like Rock Hudson), others heterosexual (like Farrell). Sometimes, Farrell took her to the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she had been ...”

“... developing the US’s new maritime strategy, aimed at restricting Soviet freedom of movement. In May 1983 he was promoted to assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey, and over the next couple of years he oversaw a secret team – operating in part out of the office of Daniel Murphy, Bush’s chief of staff – which quietly ...”

“... subject to delays. The obscure origins of the University are carefully reconstructed. In Sir Richard Southern’s distinction, Oxford was not ‘created’ – it ‘emerged’. The contributors explain the significance of its geographical location and its importance as a centre of legal activity. They discuss how it separated from the town and the ...”

“... a British government would do, one need look no further than Hong Kong in spring 1989. In late May, a sixth of its population twice marched for democracy, and they meant democracy in Hong Kong as well as mainland China. We are liable to forget that the British Government denied the vote to the people of Hong Kong until negotiations for the return of the ...”