“... issues such as the nature of explanation, the sense in which an explanation or theory may be said to be ‘final’, and whether the end-product of science is a nice-sounding, though possibly false, story about nature, or on the contrary a true and valid account of the way things are. Whenever such matters are dealt with in science books, the ...”

“... now earns his crust by penning self-serving memoirs of the Thirties, Highwood says to him: ‘I may not have read every article you’ve written or television talk you’ve given about the Thirties, but I have read and heard more than a few, and there wasn’t one that didn’t completely ignore me.’ At moments like this, we might be tempted to diagnose a ...”

“... of generations, the Civil War will lose its chronological centrality in American history, and may well come to be regarded, not so much as the great crisis of the very principle and possibility of the Union, but rather as an early difficulty that had to be overcome – one of the Union’s teething troubles. James McPherson, who has spent most of his ...”

“... poet which became an enduring model of the Late Victorian official Life and Letters, according to Richard Altick’s history of literary biography: ‘as a work of biographical art, it is as monstrous and marmoreal as a tomb in Westminster Abbey.’ And even blander than the repainted Laurence portrait. Although, inevitably, there is a good bit of factual ...”

“... modern sensibility.’ He cannot get over the idea of Thomas’s modern sensibility (whatever that may be exactly) and uses the phrase three times more in the same chapter. And his language becomes positively untrained: Thomas is ‘exquisitely sincere and sensitive’; his poems ‘seem to happen’. Yet as soon as he gets on to the Sitwells the cogency and ...”

“... no Modernist by persuasion: Michelangelo and Poussin are my cup of tea.’ This may be a joke. He does cite with approval a remark of Adrian Stokes to the effect that ‘modern art, the art typical of our day, is the slang, so to speak, of art as a whole, standing in relation to the Old Masters as does slang to ordinary language,’ adding ...”

“... to the already smouldering Humvee. A week after I had been to look at Saddam’s stuffed horse, Richard Wild, a young British freelance journalist, went to the Natural History Museum to get a story about its destruction by looters. He was a tall man with close-cropped blond hair and he was wearing a white shirt and khaki trousers. To an Iraqi he ...”

“... outside the writer, an observed rather than a felt experience. The moment Harris singles out, in May 1798, when Coleridge ran outdoors into a storm in Devon, hatless and full of febrile sensibility, was born of the desire for immersion in the elemental, the dissolution of self in the infinite, which made weather as great a theme as love for the ...”

“... from scientists: Erwin Chargaff, Jacob Bronowski, Gunther Stent, Brian Petley, and the trio of Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin. In a modest ‘anti-Sokal’ hoax, one of the contributors to The One Culture?, Steven Shapin, leads the reader initially to assume that the quotations come from critics of science in the arts and humanities wing of ...”

“... came out by Laing and Esterson, Willmott and Young, J.K. Galbraith, Maynard Smith, Martin Gardner, Richard Leakey, Margaret Mead; psychoanalysts, sociologists, economists, mathematicians, historians, physicists, biologists and literary critics, each offering their latest thinking for an unspecialised public, and the blue spines on the pile of books on the ...”

“... brogues to Lady Diana’s Jimmy Choos – and the emerging picture of a disappearing Britain may be too intoxicating to resist. The islands that these people ruled over are no more, or no more what they were, and the fog of cursing and conspiracy that distinguishes The Crown is already proving a friendly place in which to experience the pomp of our ...”

“... set for European unity. An early version of the EEC was dubbed the ‘Union Charlemagne’ by Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi in his 1950 speech accepting the inaugural Charlemagne prize, awarded by the city of Aachen every subsequent year to those who have advanced the cause of European unity. Receiving the award in 2018, Emmanuel Macron employed a ...”

“... Lives Matter, Covid-19 restrictions and most recently the Israel-Hamas war suggest this decade may be just as tumultuous. Yet many governments are restricting the right of assembly. The trend is unsurprising among authoritarians who have abandoned any pretence of toleration (think of Putin after the invasion of Ukraine or Beijing’s clampdown in Hong Kong ...”

“... to Hastings. They were violent and sometimes cruel: when peasants in Normandy sent envoys to Duke Richard II to ask for the continuation of their customary rights to wood and water, his response was to send the envoys back without their hands and feet. The practice may have been inherited from ...”

“... his brother Philipp; George Boleyn, 2nd Viscount Rochford, and William Paget, 1st Baron Paget; and Richard Pate and Hugh Askew. This last lent itself to yet another interpretation of the anamorphic skull: that it was a visual pun on the sitters’ combined surnames (‘Pate Askew’). One member of the public optimistically suggested that either of the men ...”