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“... first that we ‘know nothing of our place in the history of our species’ and next, with gross inconsistency, that we do know we are placed ‘among the earliest hundred billion humans’. But his reasoning doesn’t work. Yes, you and I may know we are in the earliest hundred billion. What we don’t know, however, is just how early this is. In the ...”

“... an oblique reflection in a late essay on Flaubert, which contains in passing the suspiciously gross misjudgment that ‘what is alone surprising with such a master is the mediocrity of his correspondence.’ Flaubert’s letters are in truth the best of their century in French, a wonderfully frank, powerful and animated compendium of his moods, his ...”

“... a time.’ The play ran in the end for 39 nights, hooted at from the expensive seats for such gross, even seditious informalities as a king asking someone what the time was, disliked by classically trained actors, who found some of the less than strict alexandrines hard to say and the jeering hard to withstand, but doing well by the author’s pocket ...”

“... by the Jews transcended the evidence of the senses and normal cost-benefit calculations. Walter Gross, head of the Nazi Party’s Office of Racial Politics, once justified the exclusion of Jewish children from schools on grounds of their ‘invisible influence’ on the ‘soul’ of German children. Nazi leaders, otherwise devotees of racial ...”

“... young in 1985. Robin Birkenhead’s draft extended to the end of 1940. It had been shown to Sir John Colville, who was asked to finish the story. He declined, but wrote an epilogue giving his own view of the Churchill he had known. He died suddenly in October 1987, having just completed the Foreword to the book now published. Robin Birkenhead had never ...”

“... all the most private and potent moments of living. Deadpan humour is their perfect foil. In gross marl, in blowing dust,       In the drowned ooze of the sea, Where you would not, lie you must,       Lie you must, and not with me. Sometimes that humour can be brutal, as in the marvellously haunting poem, never published by Housman ...”

“... War movement was the same man who had, half a century before, hounded Emma Goldman and John Reed and, later, put Leon Trotsky under surveillance in Mexico. This longevity makes Hoover’s biography a wonderful subject. Powers’s book is painfully neutral and somewhat pedestrian at times, but his authoritative command of his sources makes it ...”

“... demands, each subject to the law of diminishing returns. ‘Progress’ has its costs. Yet, as John Komlos argues in his subtle ‘anthropometric’ account of economic development in the 18th-century Habsburg Empire, the real point about the history of the West over the last couple of centuries is that Malthusian crises have been held at bay, perhaps ...”

“... or in Brussels, confronting herself, playing with Chomskyan grammar (the famous test sentences ‘John is easy/eager to please’ are a running gag). There is much linguistic chatter, for she loves language to the point of enjoying bad puns and doing a good deal of unrepentant punning herself, the pun being a model of the natural instability of ...”

“... Bentham picked up the trail, following the footsteps, not of Lowth, but of an earlier bishop, John Wilkins, as well as those of Leibniz. That thinking could be influenced and twisted by language concerned Bentham’s contemporary Von Humboldt and an ‘academic’ line proceeds to the work of Sapir and Whorf in the first half of the 20th century. A more ...”

“... itself, is chiefly valuable for its diversity. The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians edited by John Cannon is a splendid work which, even in these straitened times, should be snapped up by every self-respecting school and college library. There are over two hundred contributors; there are more than four hundred and fifty biographical essays on the great ...”

“... At some time in the 1730s Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, Midlothian, wrote down advice on the building of what he called ‘a family house’. This should consist of a central main block and two side pavilions, as a precaution against destruction by fire. ‘The main or chief Body of the House ought to be at Least double the Bigness of each pavilion and may serve chiefly for lodging the Master of the family and the better kind of Guests who come to visit him ...”

“... Psychoanalysis, says John Kerr, is ‘in a period of institutional decline’: ‘Candidacies are down, patients are harder to come by’ and other therapeutic disciplines are clamouring for attention. The seeds of this sorry situation were sown during the six-year partnership between Freud and Jung, when ‘historical accuracy first came to be less important than ideological correctness ...”

“... practical need, however, and believe that time truly is divisible is to make what is for Bergson a gross yet pervasive error: to treat time as though it were spatial. The error is the one enduringly dramatised in the Eleatic paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, where the reality of the durée, represented by the real movement of the two entrants in that ...”

“... Richard Perceval Graves. It takes over where the author’s father, Robert’s younger brother John Graves, left off. John, who died in 1980, had been described by Robert as a ‘typically good pupil of a typically good school’ (to which he returned as teacher); he had for long contemplated the composition of a book ...”