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“... There is an odd experience that Plato may have had. If light filters into a room through a small enough aperture, anything moving on the street outside will cast its shadow on the ceiling and back wall, and the shadow may have only the most abstract resemblance to the original. Perhaps the human predicament is really like that ...”

“... is the real danger for the professional historian that if he writes an outstanding biography, it may, even now, become a best-seller. For biography still flourishes – albeit on a reduced scale and with diminished intellectual self-confidence – both within and without the walls of academe. In one guise, it has been reincarnated as prosopography, which ...”

“... as a work of fiction it is vanishingly slight.DeWitt’s first novel, The Last Samurai (2000), may at first sight seem to offer little scope for the exercise of the laconic. It falls squarely into the category of high-end doorstopper – the ‘encyclopedic’ novel – which includes such celebrated behemoths as ...”

“... mansions. The countryside is treated with similar neglect, and the traveller to the island may well wonder why a place with so much natural beauty deserved to suffer so intensely from the indifference of its people. As I walked one evening by the sea, I remembered Lampedusa’s description of ‘the enchantment of certain summer nights within sight of ...”

“... of his seniors, the condemnation of his critics, and the faint sniggers of academics offstage. David Owen has had his prescription for Britain patronised by Grimond and Powell, dissected by Ken Coates, and treated like a first-year undergraduate’s essay by Professor Peter Townsend. With his publishers bringing its publication forward to catch the ...”

“... Actors don’t lodge in the culture as once they did,’ David Thomson writes in the entry on Heath Ledger in the latest edition of his Biographical Dictionary of Film. ‘They are a type of celebrity now.’ He contrasts Ledger, who died three years ago at the age of 28, with James Dean, who died 55 years ago at the age of 24 and became the standard against which all young, handsome, would-be acting geniuses in Hollywood are measured ...”

“... a barricade in the place de la Concorde, and forcing the police to resort to tear gas. Burton may exaggerate the centrality of bloodshed in French political culture, but his close attention to what Natalie Zemon Davis has called the ‘rites of violence’ reveals some enduring historical patterns. As he puts it, episode after episode of ‘almost ...”

“... the same diagnosis. It isn’t just that Archie could hardly have escaped hearing about this; Cary may have wondered if there was insanity in his family line.His system was in shock; there were stories of a suicide attempt, and these books understand that his urbanity could sometimes be reduced to tatters. His relationship with Cherrill was in ruins. It had ...”

“... colleagues. They were horrified by the progress of philosophical scepticism, exemplified by David Hume, which they saw as corroding the foundations of Christian faith. Reid, in An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense of 1764, argued in response that ‘there are certain principles … which the constitution of our nature leads ...”

“... been here far longer than I have: how did people look at the prison without feeling dismay? David Ward and Gene Kassebaum have compiled an immense study of the prison in what they call the gangster years, from its foundation in 1933 to 1948.* Drawing on interviews with inmates and guards that the government gathered decades ago, they have reconstructed ...”

“... that a single Higgs particle should be a bit smaller than an atom of gold. Incredible as it may sound, powerful microscopes can actually image individual atoms of gold. But unlike gold atoms, Higgs particles should be remarkably evanescent, with a lifetime of roughly a trillion-trillionth of a second: they simply won’t sit still long enough to be ...”

“... modern blockbuster, is over six hundred and fifty pages long), a dimly observable possibility that may have to be confronted if things really get out of hand. Fortunately for yarn-lovers everywhere, they don’t. The war that Clancy has imagined is fought, from its beginning in a Soviet sneak attack across the Fulda Gap to its end in a settlement negotiated by ...”

“... 413. Looking inland from the banks of its rivers, the Naver or the Helmsdale, you feel they may well be flowing from some distant source in Poland or Siberia. Around you mountains raise up their grey-blue massifs, habitats of red deer and golden eagle, grouse and ptarmigan. Between these heights lie long straths and glens, well-watered and greenly ...”

“... it is right that this new prime minister takes the decision about when to trigger Article 50,’ David Cameron said in his resignation speech. Few doubted that the prime minister could send the notification – the question was when it would be sent – but the claimants in Miller challenged this assumption. Treaties are agreements between states. But states ...”

“... to dictate ‘situation reports’, the teletext having jammed ‘temporarily’, according to David in the ‘ops’ room. I thought, perhaps, that with all the bad news, it had simply shown some human feeling and committed suicide. St George’s Day was my 28th birthday. This meant that my salary increased by one increment on the Assistant Governor grade ...”