“... Ithaca for twenty years whose fidelity Odysseus tests on his return. Marrying money, either as a means of achieving worldly success or as a sign that you have already arrived at it, and adultery, the failure to live happily ever after, both speak to the centrality of marriage and of the relationship of love to property – where a wife is indeed part of the ...”

“... the IPL is cricket designed to favour big-hitting batsmen; bowlers are just cannon fodder, which means they can’t command the big bucks, no matter how good they are. The prevailing cricketing order is biased in Pietersen’s favour while he remains convinced that it’s conspiring against him. Twitter feeds his self-regard and his sense of ...”

“... seem.’ How long can she keep up the versatility unrebuked? Sanders gave a rough idea of what he means by ‘establishment’ in a debate on 12 February when he took up Hillary Clinton’s laudatory review of the latest book by Henry Kissinger. ‘I happen to believe,’ he said, ‘that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in ...”

“... than non-Labour voters. The terminology of the ‘left’, ‘centre’ and ‘right’ means no more to them; and if it did, they would be as likely to vote for a ‘centre’ party in preference to a party of the ‘left’. If the Bennite neo-Marxists are on the ‘left’ of the political spectrum and the Thatcherite neo-liberals on the ...”

“... societies, whether as hunters or breeders, have to be attentive to seasons.) Seasonal means solar, and the Hebrew calendar was in fact a lunisolar calendar, as was the Chinese. Young cites Boorstin on this point, but Boorstin gets it right. (There is also one howler that deserves an erratum slip: on page 200 we learn of a book on feudalism by that ...”

“... heroism under de Gaulle’s leadership underpinned his project of postwar reconstruction; it was a means of bridging the rift between those – far more numerous than de Gaulle was prepared to admit – who had supported Pétain or the occupying forces, and those who had not; and it enabled virtually everyone to identify with victory. De Gaulle was convinced ...”

“... disagreed with Rousseau about the theatre being a school for vice; instead he saw it as a means of educating society in civic and moral values. Earnest sentiments make stodgy literature, however, and Eugénie and Les Deux Amis have a stagy, sentimental humanitarianism which has dated badly. For a new venture, he returned to the spirit of the ...”

“... monarch who was both male and monogamous was probably King George III. Put the other way, this means that from Nell Gwyn to Mrs Keppel (and beyond), the courtesan was an integral part of royal history. But while much is known about such women as the Duchess of Portsmouth, Elizabeth Villiers, Henrietta Howard and the Countess of Warwick, no serious attempt ...”

“... least by modern standards. Communications were slow and unreliable, and only the most rudimentary means existed for tracking individual malefactors. Especially in remote towns, a determined band might carry out a brazen robbery, and it would be days before the constabulary responded, by which point the perpetrators had long since disappeared. If any of them ...”

“... a happy time in Montana in 1985 watching ‘marmosets scramble around above the snow line’ (he means marmots). And on page 808 (we’re up to 1998), he identifies the secretary of state for Northern Ireland as Mo Mowlan (for Mowlam). In other words, I have read My Life, all of it, closely enough to catch two slips of somebody’s pen, probably Clinton’s ...”

“... who continue to practise with ‘senior status’ after the age of 65) are in their nineties. That means there are around eighty of them. The oldest, Leo Glasser of New York’s Eastern District, is 102. The explanation is simple. The office is held for life. People are living longer than they used to. Older people can be poor judges of whether they are still ...”

“... own translation and commentary on the most literary of all the Bible’s narratives, the story of David. The translation is conservative, fully in line with the Authorised Version (and all the better for that). The commentary is up to date, absorbing not only the latest scholarship but concentrating on the extraordinary narrative power of the story of family ...”

“... to the way things are, they simply want to be free to drift along with their fate. All this makes David Cameron a classic democratic fatalist, rather than the pragmatist he likes to present himself as. He certainly behaved like one when he exercised his veto in Brussels. The definition of a pragmatic conservative is someone who wants things to change so that ...”

“... survived, although to this day it remains hard to know how they managed it, without any obvious means of support. Like all smaller clubs they had to sell on many of their best players (including the outstanding Nigel Winterburn to Arsenal), but eccentricity or notoriety meant that others remained with the side long after they became the focus of ...”

“... everyone better off. It is not simply the case that in England and Wales economic inequality means bad outcomes are shunted down the social scale; it is also true that inequality means bad outcomes are being distributed across the social scale, making even rich English parents more vulnerable than poor Swedish ...”