“... after the ejection of his patron (and former Lord High Admiral) James II. When Pepys died in May 1703, aged 70, the autopsy confirmed that he had lived hard: his lungs were full of black spots, his kidneys full of stones and his gut was discoloured and septic. And of course he wrote a diary, nine large volumes of it, which he began on 1 January 1660 and ...”

“... questions about the Rights of Man unimaginable to Jefferson or the Jacobins. Under what conditions may human body parts be commodified – seemingly mundane bits like skin, blood and corneas as well as fancier ones like eggs, sperm, fetal tissue, kidneys and, crucially, genes and personal genetic information? What place in our social classifications is to be ...”

“... even for a mega-rich guy. Newhouse wanted both respectability and profitability, and turned to Robert Gottlieb, editor-in-chief at Knopf (US publisher of Nobrow, for those keeping score), as the man to make this cocktail swirl. In a retrospect that is easy but exact, Seabrook sees Gottlieb as a transitional figure with a compromise strategy – to use ...”

“... of Eliot’s reputation. Ploughing through these packed and not always fascinating columns may tell us as much about the craft, if that is the right word, of highbrow reviewing as it does about Eliot. On the English side one notices a steady reduction in pomposity, signalled by the disappearance of the reviewer’s plural first-person pronoun – a ...”

“... and dividing the weekends in London between his new and his old families. Unconventional this may have been, but as Wrigley shows, Taylor found it highly functional. Up at dawn and at the typewriter soon afterwards to tap out his thousand words a day (‘I try not to write more,’ he told Ved Mehta), he turned out a steady stream of books (including The ...”

“... the commands of a God who is moral ruler of the world’. Lilla speculates that Kant may not have fully appreciated the opening he created for a Christian politics. After all, his concrete proposals for diminishing the violence caused by religious-political alliances were almost identical to Locke’s: ‘greater church-state separation, an end ...”

“... wages they earn, the debts they face and the opportunities their children will or won’t have. Robert Putnam’s Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis is even more closely attentive to the changes that economic and social transformation have forced on families, schools and communities.3 Putnam presents a series of case studies of parents and their ...”

“... Godfrey Kneller’s Kit Cat Club portraits, clockwise from top left: Jacob Tonson (1717); Robert Walpole (c.1712); William Congreve (1709); Joseph Addison (c.1710). Around this time Tonson founded the Kit-Cat Club, whimsically named after a fancy pastry merchant called Christopher Cat, but in practice the engine-room of Whig politics during the ...”

“... of the blood-lettings to which Paris – described as the ‘homicidal city’ by the Norman poet Robert Blondel – was prone at this time, are shown to have been critical to the political polarisation of France into two mutually hostile zones. To speak, as Sumption does, of an ‘iron curtain’ partitioning France may be ...”

“... in Vasari’s biography of Sebastiano, but, oddly enough, not in that of Michelangelo, and matters may not have turned out quite as Vasari describes. But there does seem to have been an estrangement between the two that lasted almost until Sebastiano’s death; in that period he painted almost nothing. Vasari explained his lack of activity by the fact that he ...”

“... he said. He spent much of his time away from court, writing to his mother that he ‘faced, if I may say so, no opponent other than Your Majesty yourself’. Power was not shared equally: Maria Theresa made the decisions. But Joseph refused to give his assent if he disagreed, though his mother saw such refusals as betrayals. Numerous reports refer to her ...”

“... Sinn Féin looks set to become the largest party in the assembly following elections on 5 May. O’Neill may well become first minister – the first nationalist to hold the post. Donaldson has said this would be a ‘real problem’ for unionists.In times of crisis, unionism reverts to the Lundy principle. This has ...”

“... greatest film-maker than I did about ‘international cinema’ (or, at any rate, the movies of Robert Taylor, the Three Stooges, Francis the Talking Mule and Maria Montez). It was at the old Academy in Oxford Street, at the National Film Theatre, and at the Arts Cinema in Cambridge, that, with mixed feelings of high elation and shame at my own previous ...”

“... the rest of the century. Two other recent publications, confronting the same facts, reflect and may reinforce the change of mood described above. Marmor, Mashaw and Harvey’s excellent book begins with the statement: ‘This book has a simple message: America’s social welfare efforts are taking a bum rap.’ They continue: ‘The vision of social welfare ...”

“... socialism of James Connolly, two of the 16 who, along with MacBride, were executed in 1916. Robert Wohl in his book The Generation of 1914 writes about the vogue of martial mysticism that took hold all over Europe at the time, and Ireland was not immune. Hindsight may regard it as unhealthy, largely because of the ...”