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“... Patience Strong; ‘John’ Radclyffe Hall, but not Jan Morris; Julia Kristeva, but not Elizabeth David (nor Jane Grigson, nor even Mrs Beeton – writing about cooking does not rate high). Betty Friedan gets in, but not Mary Douglas; Hannah Arendt, but not Barbara Wootton. In general, journalists get a raw deal. There is no entry on Katharine ...”

“... I look in the index of books on either sensibility or sentiment, and if there is no reference to David Hartley I close the volume. G.J. Barker-Benfield passes the test – his index lists Hartley as well as Shaftesbury, Hume, Adam Smith and, of course, Locke, for even the non-philosophical usually know that a brief ...”

“... for the Greeks death brings sadness and pain. In a wonderful reading of the Biblical stories of David, and of Esau and Jacob, Josipovici rightly emphasises the theological restraint – what might be called the thematic restraint – of these stories, which do not exist to incarnate moral lessons so much as to present complex and contradictory characters ...”

“... threat. With the SNP looking certain to be the main opposition party in the new Parliament, David McLetchie, the leader of the Scottish Tories, pledged to support a minority Labour administration faced with a no confidence motion, much to the consternation of Tory strategists at Westminster and Labour spin-doctors both north and south of the ...”

“... of emotion; insensitive modernisation can disrupt or destroy metrical rhythm. Although A.J. Smith, the editor of Donne’s poetry in the Penguin English Poets series, is more than usually conscientious, he still prints Donne’s ‘Sembriefe’ as ‘semibreve’, making a metrically regular line irregular. A reader who was puzzled by ...”

“... the last five or six years, there have only been three significant long-running stories: the Helen Smith case, the Thorpe trial and the Goldsmith imbroglio. In the first, the Eye is merely – though admirably – allying itself to someone else’s valiant and obsessive personal quest; the second is an example of the passive scoop (police officers deliberately ...”

“... in the hope that they will defuse opposition to their schemes: it would be uncharitable to David Blunkett to suppose that he really was as naive as he pretended to be in pronouncing biometric ID foolproof. The more disturbing fact is that he could say it and expect to be believed. Given Kahneman’s title, one might expect a paean to deliberation, the ...”

“... facing their party? For all their failings in the role of leader, William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith did try at first to court the elusive middle ground in British politics; but the far from fanciful fear of electoral oblivion prompted a hurried succession of leaders, including Michael Howard, who was less temperamentally inclined to the politics of ...”

“... a similar culture. Husain now thinks that Hizb ut-Tahrir should be banned; in this, he agrees with David Cameron, who is upset by Gordon Brown’s refusal to follow up on his predecessor’s promise to eradicate it. In an email sent to various news organisations after reviews of The Islamist began to appear, Hizb ut-Tahrir said that Husain’s experience in ...”

“... it went up to 176,000 a day. When George Floyd was killed at the end of May, sales went up again. Smith & Wesson had its best quarter of all time; gun store owners say they’re having trouble keeping ammunition in stock. The NRA isn’t wrong to take some of the credit: they successfully lobbied governors – and, when lobbying failed, filed lawsuits – to ...”

“... film stars I had queued as a boy to see at the Picturedrome on Wortley Road. Here were Alexis Smith, Eve Arnold, Charles Boyer, and Tarzan’s Jane (and Mia Farrow’s mother) Maureen O’Sullivan. The four of us from Beyond the Fringe had been invited as a unit and Dudley Moore had been prevailed on (may even have volunteered) to play the piano. With ...”

“... the readers alongside, and one of those I got to know in this way was the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith. The author of The Great Hunger, an account of the Irish famine, and The Reason Why, about the events leading up to the Charge of the Light Brigade, Cecil was a frail woman with a tiny birdlike skull, looking more like Elizabeth I (in later life) than Edith ...”

“... thoughts against thoughts in groans grind. For too long, Bishop had lived these moral choices of life/death, right/wrong, male/female: but at last, the early happy years with Lota had made them seem irrelevant, and Bishop, longing for Paradise since her blighted childhood, felt she had found it at Santarém: That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther; more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile in that conflux of two great rivers ...”

“... on rather daringly slim evidence – that the thinkers who made Hume, Ferguson and Adam Smith possible were Scottish but ‘heretics’ to the Presbyterian mainstream: liberal Catholic exiles, Jacobites and Episcopalian intellectuals from Scotland’s north-east. This, and his irrepressible sneering at all things Caledonian, annoyed the Scots. It ...”