“... of Jeremy Bentham’s all-seeing ‘panopticon’. That seems apt: it allows the government to read and hear almost every message that passes between us. In his new history of GCHQ Richard Aldrich claims that this surveillance capability constitutes potentially ‘the most insidious threat to personal liberty’ we face today. Bentham’s panopticon was a ...”

“... and his world. Indeed, to get inside the mind of Mithridates one can still do worse than read a fictional reconstruction of his greatest enemy’s memoirs: Peter Green’s Sword of Pleasure inhabits Cornelius Sulla’s patrician Roman mind in all its brilliant, terrible logic. In so doing, and freed from the ...”

“... not so sure Cronenberg’s filmic output is equal to that of Jean Cocteau, Marguerite Duras or Peter Handke. Part of the problem with creative polymaths is that on exposure to their work in a new medium the viewer, reader or listener can’t help assessing the extent to which their style and methodology has been directly transposed. Cronenberg seems to ...”

“... see them, and burying a Kant or a Schopenhauer somewhere in the middle, where no one will ever read them, and regularly lugging the odd copy of something home with him in a briefcase, where he has nightmares of being squashed flat in his bed or on the can by the dead weight of accumulated books plunging through his shelves, and dreams of buying up his ...”

“... election, lent her approval to the conspiracy theory of the ‘grand remplacement’ of real (read: Christian) Europeans by Muslims. Since then, Swedish conservatives have lifted the cordon sanitaire, forming a coalition that includes the Sweden Democrats. And in Italy, the far right has won on its own.Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, one of the ...”

“... Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, Times Higher Education asked the former Cambridge vice-chancellor Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, who ran the government’s University Grants Committee in the 1980s, about her approach. ‘The instinct of a woman is to spring-clean,’ he said, ‘and this country needed spring-cleaning, not least the university ...”

“... second has been something of a mystery until now. In January 1958 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Peter Thorneycroft, resigned in protest at the growth of public expenditure. In a successful disinformation campaign it was put about that he had resigned in dispute over some relatively trifling sum. But as the files reveal, Thorneycroft had been raising ...”

“... research Claire Tomalin draws – concludes that Dickens visited Nelly for elocution lessons. Peter Ackroyd has put an only slightly less pure interpretation on the connection: Dickens and Nelly enjoyed (or suffered) a ‘sexless’ marriage, in which she played out the part of the idealised virgin bride. An opposite line which traces itself back to ...”

“... passages have been inserted, their historicity guaranteed by the editor John Steel. We read that England was beset, then as now, by vandalism, defacement, crime based on envy, vile domestic architecture, eyesores at beauty spots, over-tight trousers and captious book-reviewers. Southey (if it is he) puzzles over some of our manufactures: who needs ...”

“... riches and their kids, rotten before they are ripe, as Diderot said of the Russians improved by Peter. Buying and selling and even raising or making essentials is just that. It’s a necessary basis for civilisation, even a part, but it’s not civilisation itself. There’s no real way to glorify business just as it’s hard to glorify eating and ...”

“... drawn from one of the very few among his collaborators who are still alive, the Russian physicist Peter Kapitza: Many admire Rutherford’s intuition which told him how to set up the experiment and what to look for ... Intuition is usually defined as an instinctive process of the mind, something inexplicable which subconsciously leads to the correct ...”

“... book shows that Biafra and Ethiopia have not jaded our response to suffering, and as we read, our pain turns to anger and indignation: we despise those responsible and are ready to believe anything about them. There is, incidentally, no doubt about responsibility for the disaster. Stalin must be primarily answerable as the leading advocate of ...”

“... order his dishevelled social and sexual lives for good. The year before they married, the diaries peter out. Stanley Weintraub, who has edited all 12 diaries and the fragments from 1880 and 1917 into two stout volumes, gives the game away in his lively account of their provenance. When Shaw married Charlotte, he left his papers at his mother’s house in ...”

“... kindly paterfamilias with twinkling eyes – disintegrated; his friends were appalled. Slater and Peter Ackroyd, looking at the same letters and bills of fare, the same reminiscences of children and admirers, aren’t convinced Dickens ever slept with Nelly Ternan, but Tomalin’s Dickens is so virile (those ten children): of course he did. We know little ...”

“... the Christians’ condescending term for those who weren’t believers (for ‘Gentile’, read ‘pagan’). The imperial backing for Christianity was symbolised by the ‘chi-rho’ symbol – the first two letters of Christ’s name in Greek combined as a monogram – apparently invented by Constantine in the course of his successful military ...”