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“... president sinking precipitously in the polls, the Supreme Court vacancies represented a challenge more than an opportunity. Could the president manage to maintain the support of 55 Republican senators when he was no longer a political asset in the upcoming elections in 2006 and beyond? His nominations showed that, in this area at least, he no longer suffers ...”

“... Sir Thomas Urquhart, who is known today, if at all, as the 17th-century translator of part of Rabelais, must have been a most peculiar man. At a guess, he may have had to a preternatural degree that quality of mind, not unknown among modern scholars, that causes a man to believe that whatever he thinks, says or does is infallibly true and right, and that whatever he observes in the world is true and right only insofar as it coincides with what is already in his mind ...”

“... since abandoned. The LCS was never very large: at its most successful, it may never have contained more than three thousand active, paid-up members, though many more thousands must have attended a few meetings, even joined it briefly, then hurriedly left or slowly drifted away. In bad times its membership dwindled away to a ...”

“... equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infamy of his nature.’ Thus the good Sir Thomas Browne, meditating on urns, and on mankind’s dealings with the last mystery. Sumerian Gilgamesh journeyed to the Garden of the Sun at the world’s end to find the herb of eternal youth; but when he bent to drink at a fountain, a serpent stole ...”

“... to medicine and public health in the last three centuries. His reading of her character would be more persuasive if she were occasionally given the benefit of a doubt. Was she, for instance, always impelled ‘to fight, to cheat, to bully and to boast’ as well as ‘to save lives’? And is it not the case that without the private character we could not ...”

“... contempt to laugh at a person, than to do him any real injury’. As the Elizabethan humanist Thomas Wilson wrote, ‘the occasion of laughter and the mean that maketh us merry … is the fondness, the filthiness, the deformity, and all such evil behaviour as we see to be in other[s].’ In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton made the same ...”

“... in late August or early September 1617, came the eccentric English author, polyglot and traveller Thomas Coryate. He was a smallish, bearded man with a long, rather lugubrious face – ‘the shape of his head’, according to one description, was ‘like a sugar-loaf inverted, with the little end before’. He wore simple native clothes, and was thin to the ...”

“... If old sea-dog Thomas Coram’s mission had been to found the most English, the most 18th-century of charities, he could not have done better than launch the Foundling Hospital – which he did, its doors receiving its first infant in 1741. Till then, England – unlike other countries – had had no hospice designed for abandoned babies, though such an idea had been floated in a characteristic gesture of lay piety by Addison in the Guardian ...”

“... His career began auspiciously in the early 1940s with the enthusiastic support of his hero Dylan Thomas, but the surrealism of his early collections, such as Cage without Grievance and 2ND Poems, seemed to mark him out as an oddity who could easily be ignored. The White Threshold in 1949 and The Nightfishing in 1955 made a conscious break with his earliest ...”

“... in our world. I didn’t find it in yesterday’s newspaper, though. The historian Marcel Thomas uses it in his remarkable book, published in 1989, on Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, the man who was the spy that Alfred Dreyfus wasn’t. Thomas is thinking of Esterhazy’s acquittal in 1898. Why would a ...”

“... The novel becomes a farrago of information. In choosing to write about the American Civil War Thomas Keneally ran several additional risks. The potential subject-matter is dauntingly multifarious. How could so vast a tragedy be focused and individualised? It was a war that fairly compels the commentator to take sides. Can the novelist do so without ...”

“... believe existed in all its radiant immaculacy. Hogarth’s London scenes foreshadowed Doré’s, more than a century later, in their depiction of a dark purgatory peopled with prostitutes, pimps, rakes, gin-drinkers, beggars and all the other members of a seamy or downright criminal underclass. The most ample previously known visual accounts of the late ...”

“... heard to blurt out to a woman he had met there: ‘I just want to know what Truth is!’ This was Thomas Kuhn and what he meant was that specific truths such as those of physics mattered less to him than acquiring metaphysical knowledge of the nature of truth. Soon afterwards, he gave up physics, but rather than take up philosophy directly, he approached it ...”

“... of English literary documents have stayed convicted. In two famous cases, those of the 17-year-old Thomas Chatterton, who fabricated poems he attributed to a mythical 15th-century Bristol monk, and the equally immature William Henry Ireland, who forged manuscripts by Shakespeare before which Boswell knelt in adoration, apologists have found a degree of ...”

“... adapted through the centuries when most Tudor music was relegated to the archives.2 Beside him are Thomas Sackville, earl of Dorset, and the earls and cousins Charles and Henry Howard. All three were Byrd’s patrons, and to various degrees shared the shifts and ambiguities of his religious convictions; it was odds-on that all of them would have conformed to a ...”