“... look the same.’ Odd then that in printed books it’s possible to distinguish Henry James from Charles Dickens. Nonetheless, most authors have ignored the warnings, bought electronic typewriters and taught themselves to type, and so have those in the world of commerce, with the result that the vast increase of women taking over the clerical work of men ...”

“... he painted his murals of what he called a ‘wonderful symphony’. The painter and photographer Charles Sheeler represented the complex but austere geometry of the factory yards as a new version of pastoralism. Inevitably, however, utopian schemes encounter insurmountable human and natural obstacles. Compromises spoil their symmetry and beauty. At this ...”

“... I should also like to know how he came to write so well in the straightforward narrative style of Daniel Defoe. But on all these matters we are left to guess: we learn the facts about his life and nothing about his motivation. Like other school-leavers, he had no rational basis for choosing one university rather than another and his retrospective judgment ...”

“... 1796, four years before the Act of Union, which allowed foreigners to naturalise, and because of Daniel O’Connell’s consistent support for Jewish rights in the House of Commons. As the Jewish population increased, however, a number of well-documented attacks on them began. On Easter Sunday 1884, a crowd in Limerick surrounded the house of Lieb ...”

“... upon the pure and uncontaminated Marxism that it found in the writings of the American socialist, Daniel De Leon. It was from De Leon’s Two Pages of Roman History that the name of the League was coined, and the watchwords of De Leonism – independent working-class education and industrial power – were to remain the activating sources of the militancy of ...”

“... and copied, that Jane Austen was a highly proficient keyboard performer and identifies, as by Daniel Gottlieb Steilbelt, the noisy pianoforte music Marianne Dashwood plays during Elinor’s secret conversation with Lucy Steele. Jane Austen’s feelings about music were certainly ambivalent and often they dismay Mr Piggott. My surmise is that she often ...”

“... us about mind and its ability to think about itself. He went on to co-edit with the philosopher Daniel Dennett an annotated anthology of essays, The Mind’s I. Meanwhile, between 1981 and 1983, he wrote a sequence of some twenty-five columns for Scientific American, adopting the heading of Metamagical Themas – an anagram of the formula ‘Mathematical ...”

“... it is impossible for us now to re-create the alarming or exhilarating effect of a few pages of Daniel Defoe on an 18th-century reader reared on a literary diet of epic, pastoral and elegy. The idea that everyday life is dramatically enthralling, that it is fascinating simply in its boundless humdrum detail, is one of the great revolutionary conceptions in ...”

“... verisimilitude, realistic settings and chronological order). And then on top of that a mal-coiffed Daniel Day-Lewis – a brain surgeon, if you will – and his reiterated and creepily effective ‘Take off your clothes!’ Younger reader, I read no more. Or at least no more Kundera. He had settled in France, where he went into exile in 1975, taken French ...”

“... and illustrated by artists – beginning with the trio of William Morris, Burne-Jones and Charles Fairfax Murray, who helped launch the work after some friends came across it in a remainders box outside Quaritch’s. Two years had passed since the bookseller first published it, at the price of 1s, and not a single copy, it seems, had been sold. That ...”

“... pertinent “-ation”.’ These claims are ambitious, amounting to an alternative account of what Charles Taylor calls the ‘sources of the self’. Like Taylor, Yovel is a philosophy professor, and his starting point is a philosophical account of modernity: Hegel, the philosopher of modernity par excellence, placed the gist of the modern era in the rise of ...”

“... the book, by Louis Geoffroy-Château, is about what didn’t happen after Waterloo. Charles Renouvier’s Uchronie has precisely the opposite politics. It is ‘set … in ancient Rome to emphasise that France’s recent illiberal path had international as well as national repercussions’. Auguste Blanqui’s Éternité par les astres is a ...”

“... broad-bottomed merchant vessel reconfigured by the navy as an armed freighter. It was named after Charles Wager, the first lord of the Admiralty and mastermind of the secret mission. In May 1741, having already lost dozens of its crew to disease, the Wager ran aground in the fearsome seas off the coast of Chile. Of the ship’s original complement of around ...”

“... In 1656, three people had been accused of heterodoxy: Spinoza, Juan de Prado and Daniel Ribera, all accused of teaching questionable views in their Sunday school classes. (One can date the point at which Spinoza became unhappy with the synagogue from the records of his financial contributions, which had been substantial until one week in 1655 ...”

“... last – merde au naturel. Simply hideous.’ He preferred, ‘in this beastly Paris’, to read Daniel Deronda. Even though it was a disappointment (‘the analysing and the sapience – to say nothing of the tortuosity of the style’), it made him realise ‘the English richness of George Eliot’ and ‘the superiority of English culture and the English ...”