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“... hordes of the hungry’. (This prevalent and, in my view, productive tendency is characterised by Stephen Greenblatt’s assertion that ‘the normal is constructed on the shifting sands of the aberrant.’) Pleij’s contention (which is perhaps more relevant to Holland than to other parts of medieval Europe) is that great quantities of meat were consumed by ...”

“... trying to conceal the fact from her strict Catholic family. Their marriage seems to have made the young poet restless and dissatisfied from the start: the baby was adopted at birth, but Barker had more difficulty detaching himself from his pious and devoted wife. By 1937 even Eliot was beginning to think Barker should get a steady job, and wrote cancelling ...”

“... each of the advances Laplace claimed. The leading London science lecturer and administrator Thomas Young denounced Laplace’s over-reliance on abstraction and his ignorance, or perhaps theft, of British achievements. ‘We complain also, on national grounds, of an unjustifiable want of candour . . . Mr Laplace may walk about and even dance, as much as he ...”

“... born in 1957 and has been unusually successful, commercially and critically, since she was quite young: she won a Seventeen competition while a teenager, and published her first book, the widely admired Self-Help – made up of stories written for her MFA dissertation – in 1985. Since then, she has published two more short-story collections, Like Life ...”

“... what he called the ‘latrine’ of Hollywood, Lorre’s place in the theatre world was eccentric. Stephen Youngkin’s reverent and scholarly new biography shows that the recurring themes of Lorre’s acting life were already set before he fled to Paris from Vienna in 1933: his distinctive mixture of comedy and creepiness, his struggle to avoid being ...”

“... at Grunwick in the 1970s, for instance, or the mass campaign to get justice for the family of Stephen Lawrence in the 1990s. It’s easy to single out the excesses of campus politics and go on to depict anti-racism as an elite project – or its opposite, a form of mob rule. It would be harder to do the same with, say, the campaign to ensure that the ...”

“... took root in the public imagination. But it also set some eyes rolling. Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould were critical, and scientists across the board argued that Gaia smacked of teleology or even new-age mysticism. Can we really say a planet is an organism? What if life just evolves and there’s nothing that actually ‘seeks’ to keep it all ...”

“... like a stock Yiddish character. It is never entirely clear what he is up to. We know that as a young man he moved to Moscow because he was a Communist. But he may have been involved there in something more sinister than tailoring; he may be mad; he may have intended to murder the fashion magnate and fled from a bad conscience. Two American couples are also ...”

“... of the 19th-century counter-Enlightenment – the sadistic reactionary, Joseph de Maistre, the young-Hegelian egoist, Max Stirner, and the masochistic Catholic, Léon Bloy. With these maniac accomplices, the policeman may begin to suspect that Calasso is less the innocent gathering flowers than the underground man who snatches the innocent away. How does ...”

“... boom. In 1982, post-secondary institutions did not need new humanities faculty because of all the young hirings they had made in the early Seventies. Today, there should be numerous vacancies arising from end-of-career retirement, but some 50 per cent of public, four-year institutions are currently imposing a hiring freeze on full-time faculty members, with a ...”

“... some poignant contributions: the broken dreams of Communism reported by former believers; Rabbi Stephen Wise addressing an anti-Nazi rally; John Galsworthy’s protest about planes being used for war – ‘For the love of the sun, and stars and the blue sky, that have given us all our aspirations since the beginning of time, let us leave the air to ...”

“... the cosmic. It seems that Mr Levin’s life was changed by discovering Moby Dick. Mr Johnson, as a young man, found it ‘unintelligible’. Now of course Mr Johnson in some sense took over from Mr Levin at what one is tempted to call the late London Times. He was a little worried, following on in this line: ‘Politics was my trade, not the universe.’ No ...”

“... in which Posner is prepared to advocate a market in parental rights provided those traded are very young children who have not yet bonded. But non-monetary costs and benefits do shape institutions like marriage and cohabitation, especially when partners are freely chosen, and they go a long way in explaining resort to substitutes. The main merit of Posner’s ...”

“... that most offshore fishermen are not driven by the romance of the open sea: ‘By and large, young men from Gloucester find themselves at sea because they’re broke and need money fast.’ The work can pay off. On his only previous trip – also on the Andrea Gail – Bobby made $4,537 in a month on the Grand Banks, and Captain Billy Tyne made ...”

“... his own characteristic way a great man. His son acknowledged this in the wry admiration with which Stephen Dedalus, asked by a friend to define him, speaks of his father in A Portrait of the Artist: ‘A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a ...”