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“... disrupted; but he also believed that new equilibria would establish themselves in due course. Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (first published in 1798) had argued that human populations carry on growing until their needs exceed the supply of sustenance; and when Darwin read it in 1838 he extended the principle to all forms of ...”

“... gender roles but because women lacked the specialised training and equipment of knights. Far more often they served in support roles: supplying food for crusaders, doing their laundry, tending the sick, and providing sexual services, sometimes as prostitutes but more commonly as wives and mistresses. Many also ...”

“... represents the royal ragpicker’s challenge and Modernist recycler’s ambition: to create two or more words and meanings where there had been one, to make something memorable out of almost nothing.As extroverted singers offering discursive material, Armstrong and his contemporary Waller present striking, instructive contrasts. (Armstrong was born in ...”

“... Edward is easy to sympathise with, since his ordeal is essentially the ordeal of growing up. The more interesting figure in the parable, however, is the elder brother who stays at home. Here it is Thomas McCaskerville, Midge’s husband, a psychiatrist, who draws the parallel. He says to Stuart: ‘You want to be like the ...”

“... as a prototype of Robespierre or Calvin. It was an illusion to suppose that he had been any more committed to the freedom of the individual conscience than they had been; like them, his aim was to impose his own conscience as the rule of everyone else’s actions. Sorel took pleasure in teasing liberal intellectuals about the failings of their hero, but ...”

“... Moreland’s famous dismissal of the relevance and attractiveness of history. Less well-known, but more revealing, however, is the comment that Jane Austen was careful to insert not just before but after these irreverent lines in Northanger Abbey. ‘I am fond of history’ is Eleanor Tilney’s quiet but repeated rebuke: and since she is older than Catherine ...”

“... I am far from alone) is laid to rest by contemplating the way they order things elsewhere. Thomas Crump didn’t lead me to the lost digit, but my excessive attachment to numbers is not as hopeless as, for example, that of the Balinese, who operate ten separate simultaneous day-name cycles, a one-day cycle (in which presumably all days are Sundays), in ...”

“... In the 1840s a Thomas Carlyle could mimic the German pedantic style and laugh at Herr Teufelsdröckh of Wahngasse of Weissnichtwo (a scatalogical invention worthy of Jonathan Swift), but opposites are known to attract. As the century moved on, Wisenschaft, a portmanteau word connoting the highest possible academic culture, took hold of the British academic imagination ...”

“... took nearly twenty years to finish (though it is rather surprising that it then apparently spent more than four years in the press). Hobbes scholars were, of course, already indebted to Warrender before he embarked on his editorial work. The post-war surge of interest in Hobbes owes its impetus to the writings of three men: Howard Warrender, Quentin Skinner ...”

“... that compete, like varieties of aspirin, for the remission of aches of the mind and psyche.’ More often, though, she chooses to define American society not by its prevalent fashions and habits but by its exceptions. Bartleby in Manhattan, as its title suggests, is about those misfits and aliens who force a society to re-examine itself. Her theatre ...”

“... official Church of England, though the ‘Latitudinarians’ who came to dominate the Church had more in common with the earlier ‘Puritans’ than with Laudians. In the 18th century the ‘old dissent’, Presbyterians and Independents, was still mainly Calvinist, though Arminianism and Unitarianism were making inroads into their ranks. Calvinism survived ...”

“... Belfast on TV, in fact and fiction. But viewing the familiar mayhem at a seminar in France made me more conscious of the processes whereby a slice of life ends up as a critical category. Ireland is used to being processed abroad: whether in the memories of ‘exiles wandering over lands and seas’, or by IASAIL (the International Association for the Study of ...”

“... Why should​ poets’ deaths carry more weight than those of others? David Markson’s litany of deaths, This Is Not a Novel, starts off with a poet’s death (Byron’s) and expands to commemorate, in laconic sentences and judicious fragments, the deaths (sprinkled with quotes and quirks) of novelists, painters, composers, philosophers ...”

“... claim, however, that Berlin wishes to make about self-mastery proves to be a different and more convincing one. According to those who have wished to give a positive content to the idea of liberty, he suggests, the freedom of human agents consists in their having managed most fully to become themselves. Freedom is thus equated not with self-mastery but ...”

“... Sassoon’s normal way of talking (his poetry readings at the height of his fame had often been more or less inaudible), and it was no obstacle to a formidable eloquence when he got going. He talked in a way I had never come across before, without any reserve or hesitation, roaming across all sorts of subjects: verse techniques, the difficulty of finding ...”