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“... Even fruit could not escape his portentousness. He liked apples on account of their ‘snow-white meat and ruddy cover’, but it was ‘a metaphysical appetite, for I do not care for their taste’.Schwartz sometimes worried that his intellectualism was willed rather than authentic. In his autobiographical notes, he described ‘trying as before to ...”

“... Flournoy (1854-1920), professor of psycho-physiology at the University of Geneva, friend of William James (and later Carl Jung) and enthusiastic debunker of putatively occult phenomena. Since the late 1880s Flournoy, whose deceptively chivalrous, self-effacing manner concealed a penetrating forensic intelligence, had eagerly sought a medium on whom to ...”

“... source of effort and attention, and the place from which ... emanate the fiats of the will’, in William James’s words. This seems very plausible. Suppose the seven elements capture the conceptual core of the ordinary human sense of the self. The question then arises whether they are all essential to anything counting as a genuine sense of the self. I will ...”

“... for such an unlikely administration. For the position of chief science adviser, Thiel suggested William Happer, America’s most prominent climate sceptic and a man who had compared the demonisation of fossil fuels to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews. Trump eventually fobbed off Happer with a lowlier position, and even that proved too much: Happer left the ...”

“... the first English printed book) was The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, published by William Caxton in 1477, which grouped a miscellany of moral sayings under authorial headings. Many of the ‘quotations’ gathered in this ramshackle way would have made their ‘authors’ wince: Homer is said to have written ‘A good man is bettir thanne alle ...”

“... of refined barbarians. The pantheon contains John Vanbrugh, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, S.S. Teulon, William Butterfield, Frederick Pilkington, Dominikus and Gottfried Böhm, Claude Parent, Rodney Gordon, Richard Rogers (in his Gothic moods), Zaha Hadid. Sometimes, as with the Communist emulator of the style of Italian Fascism Douglas Stephen, architect of a ...”

“... Jones was staying with the Edes they heard a crash. Ede at once sensed that Jones had knocked over William Staite Murray’s tall vase, Heron, which Murray had said should never be in ‘an atmosphere of nervousness’. Ede himself dropped the Poisson d’Or, denting the nose. (Brancusi fixed it.) The Ede circles overlapped only here and there with ...”

“... air – a letter dropped by the Austrians stated simply that he and his observer, 2nd Lieutenant William Watkins, had been niedergeschossen and were dead. Whether they were killed instantly or died of wounds is unclear. In October 1918 two periodicals devoted to the new art of aviation, the Aeroplane and Flight, reported that Fernald had ‘died as a ...”

“... the spirit world. When, in 1905, during a séance in Boston, a medium spoke in the presence of Mrs William James of a communication from a ‘Mary’ to Henry, the message was dutifully passed on to Henry James in England, who wrote that it was his ‘dear Mother’s unextinguished consciousness breaking through the interposing vastness of the universe and ...”

“... Eastwood’s relations with his orang-utang co-star; and his excursions into biography, Bird and White Hunter, Black Heart, are brave if lumbering. But what makes and keeps him a star, as actor and director, is a certain intimacy with screen violence, or with ways of representing violence. His Westerns and his cop movies are what continue to matter, and they ...”

“... services owed at one time a considerable debt to the writers of spy stories – in particular to William Le Queux and Phillips Oppenheim. Le Queux’s hero, Duckworth Drew, whose name rhymed with his own and whose appearance matched his own self-image – ‘unobtrusive, of perfect manner, and a born gentleman’ – is first found outwitting the French ...”

“... of dazzling reef fish – pink and emerald parrotfish, blue and yellow unicorn fish, orange-and-white-striped clownfish – had recently washed up on the shore, dead. The ocean along the western edge of this Fijian island, the ‘big island’ of Viti Levu, had become too hot for its inhabitants to survive. The fish lay rotting in the sun with nubbly ...”

“... of the letter,’ Hershberger remarks. The campaign appears to have been co-ordinated with the White House, and underway long before Fonda went to Hanoi. Hershberger is an assiduous researcher, but she could have got a better idea of the extent of this co-ordination by studying the Nixon Oval Office tapes at the National Archives. On 2 May 1970, Nixon told ...”

“... sharper outlines. Second-tier players have their moment in the limelight: the secretary of state William Seward drinks too much and blusters about invading Canada; the US ambassador Charles Francis Adams keeps a stiff and chilly distance from London society, managing to seem both unformed and overly formal; the Confederate envoy James Mason says ...”

“... Paris; or imprisonment in one of Savak’s prisons. The shah tried to co-opt the left with his ‘white revolution’, an ambitious programme of land reform launched in the early 1960s, but its principal achievement was to disrupt life in the countryside and provoke an exodus of rural migrants to the slums of Tehran, which grew into a centre of ...”