“... and social democratic parties emerged to tame the excesses of private enterprise, the much rawer, more carelessly exploitative forms of capitalism found in the United States failed to provoke a political response of a similar character or on anything like the same scale. The paltry 6 per cent of the popular vote won in the 1912 election by Eugene Debs remains ...”

“... grips with the intellectual rigours of theoretical physics. J.B.S. Haldane hinted at the problem more cogently when he suggested that the universe might be not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose. Are we then up against questions that by their very magnitude become trivial? Horgan’s term for the activities of those who toil at ...”

“... behind him, not only the authority of Blake’s friends George Cumberland and John Linnell, but more recently that of Sir Geoffrey Keynes. Nevertheless there is still, to my mind, a case to be made for transferral. In the first place, Blake was extremely secretive, and it is clear that no one except his immediate family actually saw him etching a relief ...”

“... people. Four Absentees portrays brilliantly George Orwell, Eric Gill, Middleton Murry and Dylan Thomas, Portrait of the Artist as a Professional Man is an acidly amusing account of his twenty-odd years as a radio producer, and the more directly autobiographical The Intellectual Part offers agreeably eccentric views about ...”

“... François Rigolot’s venture into Lacanian psychoanalysis. Yet even here the breaking of ranks is more apparent than real, since there is no regression to the attractive Montaigne of bygone scholarship, for Rigolot’s Montaigne is an oafish actor betrayed by his own script. Rigolot posits that the very existence of the Essais is pathological. Whereas ...”

“... And if death is culturally determined, it is also historically specific and thus altogether a more complicated matter than Hamlet allows. Certainly, the Renaissance ‘crisis’ about death, which is at the centre of Neill’s concern, is a quarry worthy of the spry, meticulous scholarship he brings to its pursuit. Webster wasn’t the only Early Modern ...”

“... and Britain looming, she suspected he had run off to join the militia. Eleven years later, and more than a thousand miles across the sea, a surveyor carrying out a study of the Icelandic coast for the Danish government was guided through the barren landscape by a man who worked in a local shop. The surveyor wrote in his journal that his guide was ‘very ...”

“... only for Liverpool Corporation and never, according to records, used outside Liverpool.Further-more, the livery of the bus shown in the photo is that used in Liverpool from 1947 to 1958. If the point was of any interest to me, he added, it could all be fully documented from Liverpool Corporation records.As far as I knew, Wittgenstein and Ben Richards were ...”

“... Zarqawi to al-Qaida’s leadership, stressing the need to provoke a sectarian civil war in Iraq. Thomas Ricks later reported in the Washington Post that this was part of an American psychological operation aimed at demonising the armed resistance. The goal of the operation was to ‘eliminate popular support for a potentially sympathetic insurgency’, and ...”

“... municipalised under the Metropolitan Water Board. Eighty-five years later it was privatised once more, becoming Thames Water plc, and has since been globalised into the Rheinisch-Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerk AG. The developing technology, false starts and ingenious solutions which enabled the water to be brought to Islington and then distributed through ...”

“... events described in the book. The Burroughs/Dennison sections are, on balance, better written and more entertaining. Burroughs was very much the mentor of the group, presiding over gatherings at his apartment at 69 Bedford Street, round the corner from Kammerer’s place, feeding his acolytes Spengler, Vico, Blake, Cocteau’s Opium, even psychoanalysing ...”

“... hero who shares Simple’s charming naivety. It wasn’t until the 20th century that the novel’s more violent aspects were addressed, notably by Thomas Mann, who in 1944 called it ‘colourful, wild, crude, amusing, amorous … boiling over with life and death … and immortal in the splendour of its sins’. Following ...”

“... Evie herself, taking guidance from teen magazines about how to shrink her pores and make herself more appealing to boys. Evie pays particular attention to a black-haired 19-year-old who she will later find out is called Suzanne: ‘That was the difference between me and the black-haired girl – her face answered all its own questions.’ One day, after a ...”

“... the neoclassical taste for draped, Grecian dresses in pale-coloured, light fabrics (little more than elaborate nightgowns) made warm drawers underneath a necessity. The first women’s ‘pantaloons’ – versions of the breeches that Regency men wore – were nude-coloured and reached to below the knee, sometimes to the ankle; from the 1820s, they ...”

“... the surprise was Byron’s, which crept up on him despite his firm resolution not ‘to love any more’. Ten days into their affair, when Guiccioli announced to his wife that they were leaving, he took the extraordinary step of promising to follow them to Ravenna.Byron had previously been scornful of the Italian convention of cavalier serventismo, by which ...”