Though Aristotle claimed that a human being reaches his intellectual peak at age forty-nine (Rhetoric 1390b9), chronologists reckon a person's flowering—his floruit—at about age forty. The mists of time have made the precise reckoning of chronology quite difficult. Sometimes, when a birth is not known, a floruit can be estimated on the basis of what is known about an individual's career.

The British constitution famously rests on convention. This requires a compact between politicians working as a cabinet and a quasi-independent civil service.

It takes a village to rob one of a sense of privacy.

There is medical evidence that Lincoln was indeed dying. […] The intermittent squint of the left eye suggests that he was hyperoptic. More, Lincoln was also in notoriously bad shape.