“... is not what you have but what you choose to do with it. Still, we should be careful about reading too much into the fact that the Athenians decided to spend their windfall on a public good (the navy) rather than dividing it up into a series of private goods (individual handouts). After all, they had another advantage when it came to making this ...”

“... was overshadowed by her older brother, André, a mathematical genius who at the age of twelve was reading Plato in Greek.As a toddler Weil developed an extreme fear of germs and couldn’t stand to be touched. She was also preternaturally clumsy. At school, she couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with the others. She suffered from phobias, a sense of ...”

“... Alexander Woollcott wrote to Rebecca West that he had the ‘impression from a fairly faithful reading of Dorothy Thompson in the Herald Tribune that she may sail at any minute in order to strangle Neville Chamberlain’.After Hitler’s invasion of Poland, opinion pollsters asked Americans to what extent they were in favour of aiding European ...”

“... roman-à-clef, Sacred Paths to Wilful Freedom, circulated in samizdat in the early 1970s, only by reading the account in Nathans’s book – but I certainly recognised the combination of admiration, pity and, above all, irritation that her female protagonist felt about her impractical layabout dissident husband. Zlobina’s all too accurate reportage was ...”

“... read. One 17th-century French correspondent directly addressed the person she imagined secretly reading her letters, with a sardonic request that they at least put them back in their envelopes before sending them on their way. Others reminded their correspondents to keep schtum on topics that might draw the eye of a Tassis interceptor. Midura concludes that ...”

“... a participant recorded, they sat with ‘red ears’ as a leading authority of the WGE, Hans Peter Ipsen, instructed them on the supremacy of European law over the national law of any member state. Ipsen’s opinion would prevail: five days later Lecourt issued the ECJ’s ruling on Costa v. Enel to the same effect. The cornerstone of European justice ...”

“... with a coarse blanket for cover and an unhousebroken smell about him, of engines and tobacco. Reading and wakeful till all hours and alert all through his sleep. Even so, he hadn’t heard Queenie. He said she must be somewhere in the house. ‘Did you look in the bathroom?’ I said, ‘She’s not there.’ ‘Maybe in with her mother. Case of the ...”

“... Freud, as he immodestly urinated in front of his parents, would never amount to anything. On this reading, the dream loses its political specificity; it is simply an expression of the universal desire for patricide. The Oedipus complex, the centrepiece of Freud’s mature theory, thus promised to acquit an entire generation of politically disengaged sons from ...”

“... get hysterical about Wagner, but the old tropes still surface. Published less than 18 months ago, Peter Conrad’s big book Verdi and/or Wagner happily revisits Nietzsche’s dichotomy between the fog-bound, mephitic, enervating music of the North (Wagner) and the life-giving vitality and pagan health of the music of the Mediterranean – with the difference ...”

“... demands on human subjects that are too much to bear. Rereading the famous biographies – Jones, Peter Gay, Max Schur – I was now struck by just how exposed and vulnerable Freud was to the ills, major and petty, of the times, and by the fierce contrasts in his moods between blindness and insight, equanimity and dismay. Freud was articulate about what he ...”

“... can be to point out, there is nothing organically wrong.) But there is plenty to cherish in just reading the words, even if you have to fill in the timing and the facial movements as best you can. Sandy’s slowness of speech could be the fastidiousness of the connoisseur. He fondles words like a philologist. A polysyllable is a joy to him, and with ...”

“... Scepticism are obvious from the opening pages of Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties, Sir Peter Strawson’s urbane, elegant, and, alas, short new book: ‘The Sceptic is, strictly, not one who denies the validity of certain types of belief, but one who questions, if only initially and for methodological reasons, the adequacy of our grounds for ...”

“... from a head-hunting trip to the United States, where the big-game of major-league millionaires – Peter Widener, James G. Johnson, Samuel Kress – had leapt to profit from his publicised expertise. This was sometimes prompted by motives of undisguised envy and covetousness amongst themselves. On learning of BB’s descent on Widener’s optimistically ...”

“... fictional device, a point of view. She appends a small anthology of the poems, well translated by Peter Norman, that she deems necessary for an understanding of her narrative. Anatoly Nayman, a poet and playwright, was, along with Joseph Brodsky and Dmitry Bobyshev, one of a group of young writers whom Akhmatova made her spiritual children. He met her in 1959 ...”

“... or sociological underpinnings. The approach has also been taken up by non-psychologists like Peter Singer and Cass Sunstein. Like Hume, it ascribes to deontological rules some form of social utility, but it is often disposed to find that utility more pronounced in the past, when our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in small groups and evolutionary forces ...”