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“... only candidates for such highest-level desires are so abstract and empty as to have no mediating powers: for example, ‘I wish to be good,’ ‘I wish to be rational,’ ‘I wish to know the truth.’ What will count as good or rational or true will be determined by the contest between the first and second-level desires. Wistful top-level protestations of ...”

“... to mimic ‘illpair’d’ creations. Dulness is his imaginative resource, and a Goddess with powers so much greater than common stupidity: Laborious, heavy, busy, bold, and blind, She rul’d, in native Anarchy, the mind. In Book I, Pope has done little, beyond a shuffling of names, truly to transform Theobald into Cibber, yet Cibber, ‘the lively ...”

“... necessarily irrational. The broader framework pr0vides enhanced meaning and status, as well as powers far greater than those of natural family groups (there are exceptions, admittedly, like the Bush, Castro, Windsor and other dynasties). Behind this enhancement lies a powerful, indeed fundamental force. One might call it the enabling boundary. The import ...”

“... problem. So too, for many, is the God-human thing. That question hasn’t quite gone away – as Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists would like it to – but you don’t get published in philosophy or neurophysiology journals by invoking our unique relationship to a Creator God as a way of accounting for our mental and vital properties. The human-machine ...”

“... lies an important earlier collection, the work published in 1972, edited by Peter Laslett and Richard Wall, as Household and Family in Past Time. This book established the remarkable constancy of average household size in England since the 16th century, despite people’s mobility, with a norm of a little under five persons until the low birth rate and ...”

“... who dresses up in bogey-man costumes to frighten her into loosening her tongue. Clara’s magical powers enable her to locate the severed head of her mother (Nivea, another symbol of purity) lost in the woods after a car-smash: this head goes into the hat-box in the basement. Clara is too pure to concern herself with her sons or with any domestic ...”

“... Home Rule for Ireland​ would have given a new parliament in Dublin far fewer powers than Holyrood has today, but the mere prospect dominated British politics for extended periods over more than three decades. Three Home Rule Bills came before Parliament, in 1886, 1893 and 1912. The first was rejected by the Commons; the second was defeated in the Lords; the third passed the Commons, with the Liberal minority government being supported by the nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party ...”

“... become that in South Africa it is taken for granted that the new Constitutional Court should have powers of judicial review of legislation far wider than the peculiar circumstances of the country might have demanded. It is extraordinary how recently the courts began to have this final say in Western democracies. To an extent, informed opinion has been blinded ...”

“... republics tested the limits of central authority, and finding them infinitely elastic, used new powers or misused old ones to divert huge flows of central funds into local social programmes. The tables turned on Pavlov with dizzying speed: in his period in office the relationship between the centre and the regions, districts and cities flipped over. One ...”

“... There is a case for thinking that the crucial conversion was that of Edmund Burke’s father Richard, and that Burke grew up knowing that his father had publicly renounced as an ignoble superstition the Catholic religion which Edmund’s Nagle mother, and later his Nugent wife, continued to practise. O’Brien eloquently and convincingly argues that ...”

“... of ‘the narrow gauge of the wheels’. We are regularly and justly impressed by Holmes’s powers of observation and inference. But there is no contest between ourselves and the detective, just as there seems to be none recorded between Holmes’s prototype, Dr Joseph Bell, and his pupils in Edinburgh – or, indeed, between that ...”

“... concise manner of expression gives him a real claim to be considered a distinguished writer. Sir Richard Jebb (1842-1905) devoted the main effort of his life to the making of an edition of Sophocles with commentary. In certain technical respects he was surpassed by his German contemporaries, while to modern taste he seems to make Sophoclean tragedy too much ...”

“... who could be ‘silly like us’.Meeting the 50-year-old Auden, his undergraduate contemporary Richard Crossman observed: ‘The more Wystan talked – and he talked very volubly – the more he revealed that he is now a comfortable unreflective pundit with extremely conventional, washy views.’ Crossman’s own left-wing convictions and streak of ...”

“... autumn I bought, at Deighton Bell in Trinity Street, a copy of George III and the Politicians by Richard Pares, a book I have still, my name written in it by a friend, as I disliked my handwriting then as I do now. It was a detailed, allusive book, demanding a more thorough knowledge of 18th-century politics than a schoolboy could be expected to have, but I ...”

“... Christ) and added, in his Journals, that it was ‘quite literally lunacy’ to try to become one. Richard Swinburne’s book demonstrates the dangers of speaking about God rationally, or of arming him pragmatically. Swinburne is a theist. He hardly mentions Jesus, who is little more than a topcoat to keep the believer morally warm. Swinburne, who teaches the ...”