“... 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 ...”

“... their most sparky when working for the DNB: Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Shiva Naipaul, for instance, or Richard Ingrams on Claud Cockburn (although Ingrams has taken the trouble, it seems, to check through the Times’s files in search of that famous Cockburn headline: ‘Small Earthquake in Chile. Not Many Dead’. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t there.) Strange that ...”

“... critics of GM foods are governed by mere sentiment, by soft-centred unreflective feelings that may conflict with their more considered judgments. On the other hand, if the word is understood in its 18th-century sense, sentiment is not a feeling that could fail to be engaged. In that sense, it is an emotion associated with what moves and affects us, and its ...”

“... condemned to live in the shadow of apocalypse, without certainties or hope of moral progress, may explain why, from her first book to her last, all Tuchman’s work has dealt with wars: their origins, their consequences and, above all, what it was like to fight in them. At a time when professional historians were beginning to turn their backs on ...”

“... Reagan is a man who is at ease. Such judgments flow easily from the commentators. Take the case of Richard Nixon. He is described as having been simply a politician, a pure politician without principle other than that of acquiring and hanging on to office. But how does this explain his reactions when he is in office? Then we are told that he is an example of ...”

“... to the observer’s eye the same proximal stimulus pattern as does the real scene.’ The picture may thus be construed as a section through the visual pyramid, and if, with Leonardo, we imagine this as a pane of glass, the artistic success consists in marking the glass’s surface in such a way that there is no perceptual difference to be registered between ...”

“... he decided not on snow or lilies, but on ‘paper-white’. This association with cleanliness may help to explain why it was often invoked in medical recipes. One 15th-century charm to reduce fevers suggested writing nine apotropaic words on a piece of paper and eating a word each day (parchment wouldn’t have gone down so easily). More prosaically, it ...”

“... argue that good novels depend on being able to dramatise what people don’t know: the author may know things, and so may the reader, but people not knowing things is always more interesting than what they know. In a good novel facts will seem incidental. Tolstoy gives us a picture of life on the Napoleonic battlefield ...”

“... exploited by grizzled old men for their own purposes. Plausible evolutionary explanations for this may be offered in terms of the value of aggression in spreading one’s genes. Outsiders tend to think that a great many such explanations have at most a specious plausibility. Atran has a healthy scepticism, and speaks of just-so stories. An explanation is no ...”

“... seeing it as a specific feature of Elizabethan-Renaissance men and women. Well, Forman may have been a one-off city goat, as his contemporary the Italian miller Menocchio, recorded by Carlo Ginzburg, may have been a one-off village sceptic; but you can’t deny that he provides a heap of evidence about the ...”

“... and London; and what Italy meant to him in the 1920s is very rarely considered. Irish writers may discover their voice in exile, but critical attention concentrates on the vision of Ireland thus achieved, rather than the way it may have been conditioned by their foreign surroundings. One would expect Joyce to be the ...”