“... metals, virtues and more. In his 1703 edition of Mechanick Exercises (first published in 1683), Joseph Moxon asks: ‘What purpose would a subject like Geometry serve without its application? And where would Astronomy be without the handmade instruments by which it is practised?’ He urges the reader to acknowledge the debt that philosophical disciplines ...”

“... partly by government attention to the long-term resource situation. Gray stands with Hayek and Michael Polanyi in regarding the epistemic character of markets as their greatest virtue: markets can transmit through price signals a vast amount of local information about economic conditions and initiatives that simply cannot be made available for general use ...”

“... Administration avoided the disastrous excesses that crippled its successors. Brendon’s Ike and Michael Beschloss’s May Day – an absorbing history of the 1960 downing of an American U-2 espionage plane and the consequent collapse of the Paris summit meeting between Eisenhower and Khrushchev – reflect both the extent and the limits of the revisionist ...”

“... the hymn which, in some versions of the myth, the Titanic’s orchestra played as they sank. (Joseph Conrad said ‘it would have been finer if the band ... had been quietly saved, instead of being drowned while playing.’) Berlin is ‘where Europa is at its darkest’, Cuba the locus of defeated aspirations. Cuba’s socialism gone sour has deep links ...”

“... religions and so no better than it should be. Hamilton led the way by writing a letter to Sir Joseph Banks, the Secretary of the Dilettanti, in which he described the curious rites still extant at Isernia in Southern Italy, where a festival in honour of the saints Cosmus and Damianus culminated in a church service to bless an organ euphemistically known ...”

“... from Enoch Powell, who was by then, scarier still, an Ulster Unionist, to Tony Benn and Michael Foot. With a sly coyness that sits oddly with her later reputation, the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher, operated, like Wilson, on the sidelines of the Yes campaign. The result, in a notionally divided country, was a ...”

“... police officers from the small town of Hull, Massachusetts, near Boston, arrived at the house of Michael and Carolyn Riley in response to an emergency call. Their four-year-old daughter, Rebecca, had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder two years earlier. When the officers reached the house, they found Rebecca sprawled on the floor next to her teddy ...”

“... 75th birthday is approaching, and a historic summit is planned between the Führer and President Joseph Kennedy, as nearly twenty years of Cold War between the world’s two superpowers look set to thaw. And then the corpse of Josef Bühler, the one-time state secretary of the General Government, washes up in a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. Xavier ...”

“... appears to Mary to tell her she will become the mother of God and another, unnamed angel forewarns Joseph about the Massacre of the Innocents.Many angels are also famous saints. The town of Saint-Raphaël lies close to Saint-Tropez, but the two resorts’ patrons belong to different orders of heavenly being (Raphael is an archangel; according to legend, St ...”

“... There were already good biographies of Shaw, notably those of Frank Harris and Hesketh Pearson, both of whom knew Shaw and had the benefit of his energetic interventions. Pearson in particular will not be easily supplanted. Nevertheless the archives of the world are full of Shaviana inaccessible before his death, and because there had not been a serious attempt since 1956 – the centenary year – the Shaw Estate sensibly decided that the time had come for a new biography, and invited Mr Holroyd to write it ...”

“... to him was a tuxedoed man pumping his fists at Trump’s every line to lead the cheering throng. Joseph ‘Joey No Socks’ Cinque is a former associate of the Gambino family boss John Gotti who was convicted in 1989 for possession of stolen artworks including a couple of $20,000 Chagall prints and a Miró. (The New York district attorney’s office withdrew ...”

“... historians of British art have offered us two different Hogarths, with about as much in common as Michael Howard and Dennis Skinner. One of them is described by David Solkin in his Painting for Money, reviewed in these pages last year by Ronald Paulson. Solkin’s Hogarth is an ambitious social climber, determined to efface the memory of his beginnings as an ...”

“... right foot being too near the female alms-giver’s heel – though these are features for which Michael Fried has found an unexpected justification, as being part of a scheme to unsettle the conventional relationship of viewer to canvas. According to Crow, at all events, David’s decision was to ‘go for the bold stroke’ and to push forward regardless ...”

“... paedophile, martyr, traitor, major minor writer. In an Omnibus programme broadcast late last year, Michael Bracewell claimed that he was ‘the century’s first pop celebrity’, and tried to persuade us that, in the manner of an Elvis or a McCartney, Wilde was a working-class lad made good. Cut to a shot of Bracewell looking uncomfortable in a gargoyled ...”

“... shooting in the context of Anglo-Irish relations at the time. The gunmen, Reginald Dunne and Joseph O’Sullivan, were members of the IRA, which had emerged in 1919 to consolidate the Irish Republic declared by Patrick Pearse and others in the Easter Rising of 1916. The republican cause was strengthened by the victory of Sinn Féin in the December 1918 ...”