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“... to other forms of chess: and that is all. It would surely have been of interest to describe the powers of the Cannon, which introduces a radically new idea into chess: it has the same move as our Rook, but can capture only by leaping over one intervening piece (and can leap only when making a capture), giving check in the same manner. Japanese chess ...”

“... now have – that is his starting-point and he is not interested in the apologia of the super powers about military balance and the like. At the same time, he is realistic about the prospects for the ‘historic compromise’ he proposes between West and East, not least because, living in the centre of Europe, he knows about the continuity of Russian ...”

“... on the score that everyone was doing it: receiving foreign bribes and subsidies was known under Richard Cromwell. The second she rebuts on the score that Charles saw it as the most effective way in which the French king could be bound to him, rather than the other way round. From this standpoint, it can be argued that Charles was ensuring a firm alliance ...”

“... of as only partially understood. The Vedanta centre is where Isherwood began his training – in Richard Alpert’s expression, ‘to become nothing’. The world is seen as mad, and forces the weary traveller from Europe to subject himself to a difficult regime of retreat and quiet. A ‘homesickness for sanity’ is the one valid reason for putting oneself ...”

“... his language when looking on a Lost City. The reader will quickly learn to make allowances for her powers of self-dramatisation and also for her capacity to detect, as she thinks, signs of tension in others (she has a history of ‘nerves’ and breakdowns). When the war begins she remembers the young sailors she saw in Barrow at the time of Munich. They all ...”

“... lack of acknowledgment could be read as a perverse testimony to the intellectuals’ own superior powers of discernment. They were flattered by the paradox that it was the practical men who showed their naivety precisely by supposing themselves quite exempt from intellectual influences which only other intellectuals could recognise as enslaving them. Academic ...”

“... played by Malcolm McDowell, passing the vodka to his friends, Johnny and Wallace (David Wood and Richard Warwick), asks: ‘When do we live? That’s what I want to know.’ Elsewhere in the film, when the three of them are fencing together, playing at fighting, Travis gets cut on the hand, and is fascinated by his own blood. ‘Look,’ he says: ‘real ...”

“... of the Larkin oeuvre by way of his Sapphic schoolgirl jottings and taste for mannish women. For Richard Bradford, however, it’s still 1993. ‘Left-leaning commentators’, in league with ‘academics and other members of the literary establishment’, are gunning for Larkin and Amis from all sides. With no Clive James or Martin Amis to stand up for the ...”

“... scepticism and hostility, whether from other intellectuals or professionals or from the powers that be in the academy or the state. If people express doubts about the continuing credibility or desirability of your subject, it’s no bad thing to be able to point to some towering intellect whose stature nobody dares to impugn, and who if not actually ...”

“... that it chose an author with no detectable sensitivity to language. Here, for instance, is Richard Shannon (emeritus professor of modern history at Swansea) on the possibility of the European Convention on Human Rights being embodied in British law: ‘What was coming into view now was a swell of opinion wanting to move beyond merely Parliament’s not ...”

“... four allegorical novels of enormous length, typically about a humble ruler beset by hostile powers. Even as US tanks approached Baghdad in April 2003, he was overseeing the publication, with a forty thousand copy print run, of his last novel, Get Out, Damned One!, whose plot hinged on fearsome resistance to foreign occupation. His first novel, Zabiba ...”

“... and Bishop of Chester, displayed it in brilliant emendations of the text of Aeschylus. In 1662 Richard Bentley, one of the greatest critical scholars, was born near Wakefield. In 1700 he became Master of Trinity, and despite continual battles with the fellows survived until the age of 80. Bentley was an outstanding textual critic. His famous edition of ...”

“... were activities hugely dependent on the navies, armies and trading companies of the big imperial powers. The mutiny on the Bounty ruined a mission in imperial botany: Lieutenant William Bligh’s task had been to secure breadfruit trees from Tahiti, then carry them to the Caribbean to provide cheap food for slaves on the sugar-cane plantations. (The trees ...”

“... the only ones hungry for these insights. The popularisation of behavioural economics was led by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book Nudge (2008), which inspired the setting-up of ‘behavioural insights’ teams in governments around the world (with Cameron’s coalition government at the forefront), and has nurtured a view of policy that is attentive ...”

“... this or that physical attribute, or name, or occupation, or address. Readers familiar with Richard Ellmann’s biography of 1959 will be disappointed. Born in 1882, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was the first surviving child of John and May Joyce, whose recent marriage had been fiercely opposed by both sets of parents. Their first baby, named after ...”