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“... one hundred years ago, Joseph Conrad produced a remarkable, and peculiar, essay arguing that Nelson was a great, and a modern, artist. His genius was to revolutionise ‘not the strategy or tactics of sea-warfare, but the very conception of victory itself’. In pursuing a total annihilation of the enemy, Nelson led ...”

“... a problem. Broadly speaking, the sea has produced few Cobbetts: in this collection I remember only Franklin and Dana as being capable of giving a spare, direct account of the ocean upon which they travelled. Many of the others, including those who, like solitary yachtsmen, know a great deal about the sea, seem, when confronted with its immensity, to despair of ...”

“... Lamont didn’t even bother to speak. His place was taken by his Economic Secretary, Anthony Nelson, who was educated at Cambridge and trained at Rothschild’s. Nelson made a speech of monumental complacency to the effect that there was always a rotten apple in the barrel and the Government was resolutely determined ...”

“... to be expected. Virtually every 20th-century President has tried to pack the Court in some way. Franklin Roosevelt, for example, stacked it with liberals back in the Thirties so as to further his New Deal. What was remarkable about Bush’s behaviour on this occasion was his blatantly cynical but entirely successful response to his limited freedom of ...”

“... into several ages in which different tasks were required of man, after the teaching of John Nelson Darby, a 19th-century Plymouth Brethren minister) had been of no more importance, theologically, than Tennessee snake-handling. Lindsey broadened dispensationalism’s doctrinal base and gave end-times religion mass appeal. In his sceptical ...”

“... it is a political reality.’ A white liberal would say the same, but then, I take it, so would Nelson Mandela. The difference is in the intensity with which the political reality is experienced or denied. Baldwin understands the needs met by the Black Muslim movement in America, even as he recognises that there is ‘nothing new’ in its reverse racism ...”

“... wore expensive gear. Black Dracula jackets and toreador pants with black puttees or black Benjamin Franklin smalls with sheer black hose and black cloth ballerina shoes made in the Republic of China. One displayed a set of Sadeian bondage accessories that James reckoned could have cost a hundred quid. A broad black leather dog-collar, a hip-belt, and a shackle ...”

“... long history. The Egyptians did it, yet by the late 18th century the skill had been lost. Benjamin Franklin speculated that a body might be preserved in a vat of madeira (then revived after a century to see how America had changed), and in 1805 Nelson returned from Trafalgar pickled in brandy. A few years later, when Jeremy ...”

“... Reveille with Beverly is a now largely forgotten 1943 film starring Ann Miller and the great Franklin Pangborn. Worked up from an equally forgotten US radio series it’s a corny but percipient tale about a spunky young DJ who’s hep to the vital Swing rhythm the kids all dig, and the stuffy station owner who wants no part of her indecorous jive ...”

“... what’s really ‘curious’ about assisted reproduction technologies, as the sociologist Sarah Franklin has written, is how quickly they have come to seem so normal. These technologies do not just produce babies, but normality itself, and its main components: mothers, fathers, parents, families, races, nations, societies and cultures, not to mention sex ...”

“... so as to watch out for him in a forthcoming Honours List. As it is we can only be grateful that Nelson Mandela wasn’t imprisoned in England or he would have been bankrupted on his release. 12 August. While it ought to be a pleasant place to shop, Marylebone High Street is spoiled by the people who shop there, who are often pushy and heedless so ...”

“... for hours with my next child – the certainty that I was dying.‘To let the baby out,’ Maggie Nelson writes, ‘you have to be willing to go to pieces.’ ‘Just this is miraculous,’ Carole Maso writes. ‘That I ploughed without illusion towards death. Even as I gave life.’ Not everyone describes birth as an encounter with death: there are ecstatic ...”