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“... of belonging in absence without being threatening; it may even allow you to become the centre of a small community of your own; suitable candidates for this role would be an admiring younger brother, or a young and loving wife whose humble social background and limited education guarantee that she will always be beholden to you, however you behave. Conscious ...”

“... strike on the Syrian reactor in 2007. But we have to wonder whether his resort to Sarin gas on a small but verifiable scale is intended to make Western powers shudder at the consequences of his regime’s unravelling. It’s clear enough why Obama decided to end Bush-style wars against alleged state sponsors of terrorism. But why did he authorise an ...”

“... of work. After the enormous press coverage of A Brief History of Time, all the world knows that Stephen Hawking has motor neurone disease, can speak only with a computer-synthesised voice controlled by the few fingers that he can move, and fills the same Cambridge chair as Newton did. The 14 essays of the new book, together with a Christmas Day radio ...”

“... she might as easily have been a scientist, like her father (an entomologist) or her brother Stephen (an astrophysicist). She shares her father’s despairing ecological awareness, together with her brother’s logically detached interest in the nature of time. Both concerns are evoked in childhood memories of strenuous field trips in the Canadian ...”

“... of objective’: ‘We all want socialism some time, but some are more impatient than others.’ Stephen Haseler’s approach is very different: no grass-roots research for him. He was active in support of the Social Democratic Alliance, which, he claims, attracted considerable publicity in the mid-Seventies for its ‘robust condemnation of left-wing ...”

“... The Nature of Space and Time contains six lectures-three by Stephen Hawking, three by Roger Penrose – and a closing Hawking-Penrose debate. As Penrose indicates, it might be viewed as continuing the famous Bohr-Einstein exchange of some seventy years ago. Against the background of new cosmological theories, Hawking defends Bohr’s thesis that quantum theory has no radical incompleteness ...”

“... What is​ a ghost?’ Stephen Dedalus asks in Ulysses, and promptly answers his own question. ‘One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.’ Not a figure who is entirely unreal, just one who has become a little faint, lacking in physical immediacy. Perhaps someone who lives in the memory only, not an inconsiderable form of life after all ...”

“... intrusion of the executive power into the judicial. But it has proved its worth in the small but crucial series of cases which have revealed a procedurally unappealable trial to have been a source of substantive injustice. The law has a self-protective tendency, of course, both because its practitioners think (understandably) that they know more ...”

“... own businesses (since Victorian and Edwardian cities tended to be governed by manufacturers and small businessmen). Public or private: which is better? As Millward notes, almost all comparisons end up as inconclusive. The political choice will always be made for reasons external to the enterprise itself. Turning to the social services, Marguerite Dupree ...”

“... historians (Kenyon among them) who believe in his greatness. Maitland’s relationship with Leslie Stephen and avid interest in Meredith’s novels would appear to be precisely the kind of detail Kenyon enjoys. Some room might have been found for Sir Henry Mame’s genius, even while debating whether he fits the category of historian. Much better use could ...”

“... Another time he had given up because his ‘work fell so far short of the standards set by Leslie Stephen’. But I suspect he was amused by a young man’s persistence and when, eventually, the proof stage of one volume was reached, he would call at the office, listen to my trivial comments, courteously accepting some of them, and then take me out to lunch ...”

“... your love dressed all in white, but come back only from the grave. The Victorians revelled in it. Stephen Foster’s audience grieved for Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair, the lost one ‘who comes not again’. The big Romantics all had their more portentous versions, from Lucy ceasing to be, to Shelley’s solipsistic sad heart, filled with grief ‘but ...”

“... the United States experienced a less obtrusive coup d’état: the hustled retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer, the oldest of the three remaining liberals on the Supreme Court. The prematurely leaked announcement in late January took Breyer himself by surprise. But the leak wasn’t any more of a breach of constitutional decorum than the insistent lobbying ...”

“... in which the Greeks and Alexander, though disruptive, play an essentially peripheral role. Stephen Ruzicka sets out to correct this in Trouble in the West, and he does so with formidable scholarship, a talent for extracting the maximum possible amount from evidence often as obscure as it is patchy, and a commendably objective approach to the sort of ...”

“... and even managed to gain the disapproval of his old primary school teacher who, according to Stephen Gilbert, admired his final interview but was not pleased when ‘he said “God the old bugger” ... I didn’t like that.’ It was such a successful finale that I still expect the credits to roll and Potter to pop up again to instruct us not to assume ...”