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“... Somehow or other it transmits its own self-regenerating power to the swimmer. I can dive in with a long face and what feels like a terminal case of depression and come out a whistling idiot.’ With his trusty snorkel, he stakes out the whole of watery England for his Grail quest. Like D.H. Lawrence, Deakin is happy, in the end, to remain mystified by the ...”

“... Roland Jackson doesn’t make much of the incident in his recent biography, which is immensely long and devotedly successful at unearthing the facts of Tyndall’s life from the hundred boxes of his private papers, but tone-deaf when it comes to interpreting them, contextualising them or putting them to best effect. Jackson describes the Mer de Glace trip ...”

“... they could only have been bought at an ecclesiastical supplier. As to the people, a steady day-long stream became a flood after six. Many were parents (frequently both parents) with children, but the population as a whole seemed fairly well represented. The majority were women, but only just. There were many ‘businessmen’ (for want of a better ...”

“... all of them stamped with a presumably random excerpt from the Stone’s inscriptions. It’s long been the received wisdom locally that this fractured slab of granite is the collection’s most looked-for exhibit, and it’s certainly easier to get a clear view of the trade versions than it is of the original, which is screened daylong by visitors who ...”

“... might suggest. Accounts of the growth of 19th and 20th-century government, for example, were long dominated by the supposed antithesis between ‘individualism’ and ‘collectivism’, advanced by A.V. Dicey as the master key to the evolution of the modern state. This tidy and convenient model is now largely rejected by empirical historians, not least ...”

“... tone has grown drier and more brittle as the century has grown older. Dewey was, throughout his long life, as wet as they come. Ryan rightly remarks that Dewey ‘defended democracy as the modern, secular realisation of the kingdom of God on earth’. But Dewey was convinced that the romance of democracy – the vision of human beings freely co-operating to ...”

“... the maddening mind Forgets that life was good once, and fate kind, Remembering only these long years of war, The great grim battles by the northern shore, The comrades dead and maimed and mad and blind.He found much to admire in his comrades, and their example pushed him further from his mother’s conservatism. ‘We are a very democratic lot,’ he ...”

“... into an unpredictable pattern of desultory magazine work and short-lived personal projects. Long after the Blackwood’s attacks were over, the charge of Cockneyism continued to frighten the booksellers; and by the early 1830s, Hunt found himself deeply in debt (he had always been spectacularly careless with money), and with a large and unruly family to ...”

“... I met​ Steven Runciman several times towards the end of his long life. On one occasion he told me, as he told many people, that as a young man he had danced with a friend of his mother who, in her own youth, had danced with Prince Albert. He seemed slightly disconcerted when I insisted that he dance a few steps with me so that I could say I had danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince Consort, but he did it and our little turn round the room made me feel in some psychic way closer to the court of Queen Victoria ...”

“... called ‘The Problem of the Presbyterian Independents’. He pointed out that many members of the Long Parliament whom historians had traditionally labelled ‘Independents’ were appointed elders of the Presbyterian Church set up in 1645-8, and that many ‘Presbyterians’ sat in the Rump of the Long Parliament, which ...”

“... Maxwell published a famous diagram of this ether as a vast array of spinning gears separated by long strings of ball-bearings, a bit like Charles Babbage’s newfangled calculating engine on show in the College museum next door. He showed that the equations of such a complex array, suitably adjusted, were exactly the same as those of electromagnetism, and ...”

“... Cats and wolves speak and dwarfs traverse huge distances in boots that are seven leagues long. Nothing needs to be explained in a world where anything can be real. Bluebeard’s blue beard, which causes his future wife to loathe him, is simply that, not a symbol to be decoded. The illustrations, which embed meditative damsels in the haunted thickets ...”

“... of the serfs, Alexander II quickly dashed them: the final emancipation law was badly flawed and a long period of repression and reaction followed. The populists were driven underground by the regime’s crackdowns on public meetings, demonstrations and organisations. It was one of these informal societies, the Chaikovtsy, that gave Kropotkin his first taste ...”

“... in a preface he offered a pre-emptive apology: he was a philosopher by vocation – had been as long as he could remember – so the story of his life could not be anything more than a compendium of abstract ideas. But the remark was not as self-deprecating as it looks. It was among other things an allusion to John Stuart Mill, who had opened his own very ...”

“... the Chief Justices to slot into Mansfield’s judgment the peroration: ‘The air of England has long been too pure for a slave, and every man is free who breathes it.’ And there, in legal folklore, it has remained. But the creditable fact is that Mansfield, who not many months before had refused to act on the verdict of a jury that another escaped ...”