“... Clive were enrolled in the pantheon of imperial greatness. The statue of the Bristol slave trader Edward Colston, toppled last year, was put up in 1895, though he died in 1721. But the strategy was a failure: more people learned about Colston in the 24 hours after his statue fell than in the 125 years it stood in Bristol city centre. In south Mumbai, the ...”

“... fire and floods, killed between thirty and sixty thousand people. The disaster, all the preachers said, was God’s punishment for sinfulness. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, saw it as divine vengeance for the cruelties of the Portuguese Inquisition. He had identified a minor earthquake near a racecourse in Yorkshire as another such intervention: God ...”

“... humanities appointment in Scotland: the chair in moral philosophy at Edinburgh. It has to be said, however, that Professor Wilson was an even more fictitious character than Christopher North. His appointment was a political one, and Wilson remained indebted, throughout his academic career, to the silent assistance of Alexander Blair, an old college ...”

“... aggressor and none of his neighbours, or his neighbours’ powerful friends, believed him when he said he had put away his weapons for good. Puffing on his pipe, the older man offered reassurance. Many years ago he was known as the most dangerous man in his neighbourhood, yet now everyone thought of him as harmless. Several months have passed since tea and ...”

“... the perfect opportunity for those jarring random encounters with people you don’t know that are said to characterise life in the big city. As Bernard puts it, ‘the elevator cab – in the days of Poe and Baudelaire just beginning to be installed in the grand hotels, by the time of Simmel and Benjamin a permanent part of urban architecture – is the ...”

“... came from a distinguished Boston family. William James introduced the pair and became one of Edward Estlin’s godfathers. As well as the grand house at 104 Irving Street where he was born, Cummings’s family had a summer house in New Hampshire, which he would enjoy until the end of life. He died there in 1962 of a brain haemorrhage while cutting ...”

“... the first time, linked with ancient texts on ‘uterine suffocation’, as we see most notably in Edward Jorden’s anti-Puritan tract, A briefe discourse of a disease called the suffocation of the Mother (1603). Here, hysteria is possession de-demonised with the help of Hippocrates’ gynaecological theories. If it is indeed true that hysteria comes into ...”

“... moved towards an enlightened pluralism – ‘I pursued … a slightly rebellious policy,’ he said in a radio interview that same year. Ogilvie describes such statements as ‘self-promotion’. ‘This is not to ascribe mendacity to Burchfield,’ she insists, yet ‘his claims for what he had done … simply were not true.’ She is not accusing him of ...”

“... behalf distant wars are ostensibly being fought? How normal are the normal lives these wars are said to be protecting? What feeling, if any, is there for those suffering human beings who are not our friends, relatives or fellow citizens? And how do the media stimulate or repress such feelings? After the photos of the fire-bombing of retreating Iraqi columns ...”

“... an English poet verges on the inaccurate so far as language is concerned. Ardis Butterfield once said on Radio 4’s In Our Time that he was in effect speaking French in English; and at a recent conference Elizabeth Archibald suggested that he was writing macaronics – those poems that combine two or more languages within a single verse form – only in a ...”

“... the ‘powerful grip that genes have recently come to have on the popular imagination’. Having said which, Keller acknowledges that gene talk has not yet outlived its usefulness and raises the question of what it is actually for. The ‘gene paradigm’, in its seductive simplicity, plays an important rhetorical role, genespeak having long become a ...”

“... of that scientifick difference for ever after . . . “Hierarchy?” offered I. “elysium,” said he.’ Gould sees his taxonomic duties as a worrying attempt ‘to re-create the natural world as a penal colony’. But he’s had worse offers, so he plays along. So much for Enlightenment Rationalism and the Progress of Science. All this continues for a ...”

“... as Trajan and Septimius Severus, who hailed from Spain and Africa. By the 18th century, however, Edward Gibbon and others had concluded that the problem was the Romans themselves, and their loss of faith in the enlightened civic values that had once made Rome great. A different response would be that the Roman Empire didn’t fall in the fifth century, or ...”

“... the artist’s fantasies about himself.’ It also, of course, matches what Hughes has just said about him. I say ‘poignancy’ because Hughes clearly cares a great deal about art, artists, politics, culture in general, Australia, Barcelona, religion, the American redemptive idea, Amish quiltmaking, and every other damn thing he’s written about. He ...”

“... became President on the death of Roosevelt in 1945, it was customary to laugh at him. It was said that the United States had exalted the common, ordinary man, and that they were now landed with one as their leader. But the critics were confounded as the small-town politician readily assumed the status of a world leader who, with unusual decisiveness, put ...”