“... children, both legitimate and illegitimate’, may have been the father of a second ‘“Benjamin Johnson fil. Ben”, baptised at St Martin-in-the-Fields’ in 1610. And on the matter of what might have constituted traumatic experience for Jonson: he had at this point lost his own father before he was born, fought and ...”

“... that it pursues extravagant metaphorical connections, in the manner of those Elizabethan poets Dr Johnson was so sniffy about. By the time she came to write her fourth novel, Written on the Body (1992), perhaps Winterson was beginning to find all these fancy plots a bit beside the point and babyish, which of course in a way they were. So WoB is largely ...”

“... in the United States has achieved or been placed in a certain artistic niche,’ James Weldon Johnson wrote, at around the same time, in his preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922): When he is thought of artistically, it is as a happy-go-lucky, singing, shuffling, banjo-picking being or as a more or less pathetic figure. The picture of him is ...”

“... fight off the threat of defeat in the Brexit referendum. Obama is greeted by an op-ed from Boris Johnson in the Telegraph attacking him for removing a bust of Churchill from the Oval Office. ‘Some said,’ Johnson wrote, ‘that it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British ...”

“... its great English Augustan phase, and in this and other ways a model for Dryden, Swift, Pope and Johnson. He is remembered in the textbooks, but he has always seemed too problematic for canonical assimilation. As a satirist, he was the last great practitioner of the ‘rough’ vitriolic style deemed to derive from ‘satyrs’, and Pope thought him ...”

“... the landscape is not as bleak as he suggests. Paulin finds room for two such poets, Linton Kwesi Johnson and John Cooper Clarke, though I might not have echoed his choice from the latter: the 82 uses of ‘fucking’ in 50 lines would perhaps be more effective in performance than on the printed page. One of the main difficulties for theorists of an organic ...”

“... them, Professor Jerome Ch’en, writing on the Chinese Communist movement up to 1927; Professor C. Martin Wilbur, who describes the creation of the revolutionary movement and the drive to unify China in the five critical years between 1923 and 1928; and Professor Marie-Claire Bergère, who examines the rise and political failure of the Chinese bourgeoisie ...”

“... Devil’s doings but as products of cerebral abnormalities. The great Parisian nuroanatomist Jean-Martin Charcot experimented on hysterics’ reactions to pain stimuli, using hypnosis to induce anaesthesias and hyperaesthesias. Others explored the ‘phantom organ’ and, conversely, the loss of sensation in an intact part – occurrences given an ...”

“... and ‘a less charismatic Gaddafi’ (though French intelligence is now working with him and Boris Johnson has been pushing for Britain to revisit the matter). Spurned by the US, he has turned to Russia for backing and was recently photographed in Moscow wearing a ushanka. A classic war on terror rhetorician, he has been taking on Islamic State, non-IS ...”

“... as one big revolutionary cocktail party, with people like Oliver Tambo, W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King in attendance. Accra quickly became a magnet for liberation movements across the continent, but it also attracted spies, war criminals and corrupt businessmen. Malcolm X remembered sitting in a hotel dining room there, listening to Americans ...”

“... of scientists, almost all of whom had studied or taught at Cambridge. Williams was proposed by Martin Folkes, a young polymath, just a few years older than Williams himself and particularly distinguished in mathematics and astronomy. Also present were Folkes’s close collaborator Robert Smith, another youthful mathematical prodigy, who had just been ...”

“... defeated though it was, and in part because of the restraints imposed on it by Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, was in retrospect an essential and noble demonstration to the world, and especially to the Communists, that America was determined even under the most daunting circumstances to fight against any expansion anywhere of Communist domination. Howe ...”

“... miscue in his dealings with Bellow to account for the bungling of what could have been a beautiful Johnson-Boswell partnership. The book is a goody bag of quotable incidents and a useful guide to the biographer’s tradecraft, but pertinent to our immediate interest is the section where Atlas gives a draft of the work in progress to the social scientist Edward ...”

“... something that the social at its highest serves to nourish and protect, as the parent the child. Martin Buber called it the ‘I:Thou relation’. The two kings as children loved each other. Under the frigid social discourse lies the necessity that empowers it, the human innocence of loving. But the second courtier, Camillo, makes it plain how appallingly ...”

“... comparably harrowing stories to be evoked: This was the period of the Irish famine and Mrs Bell Martin ... devoted herself to the relief of her father’s tenants. In so doing, she ruined her family and was gratefully termed ‘The Princess of Connemara’ by her people. Thereafter penniless and landless, she emigrated to Belgium where she supported herself ...”