“... house through his reputation as a philosophical virtuoso, and they still valued his opinions and took pleasure in having him at their elbow as a personal ‘living dictionary’. He distinguished himself from other men of letters, moreover, by keeping himself clean and sweet-smelling and retaining a wistful sense of humour. ‘I have never,’ he ...”

“... once, to cooking for himself at his $400-a-night cabana at the Chateau Marmont. ‘Cooking crack took practice, but it wasn’t rocket science,’ he writes. ‘I became absurdly good at it – guess that 172 on my LSAT counted for something.’ The tension in Biden’s memoir is between the high-achieving politician’s son and the chronic alcoholic and ...”

“... blouse and ‘willow-green’ slacks – two colours Matisse liked very much. It worked: Matisse took an immediate liking to Gilot, whose eyebrows reminded him of ‘circumflex accents’, and he declared that he would like to make a portrait of her with green hair. This rattled Picasso, who was so proprietary he once suggested Gilot wear a scarf covering ...”

“... the TV pictures of the doomed publicity stunt undertaken by the former Minister of Agriculture, John Gummer, showing his attempt to force his daughter Cordelia to eat an over-hot burger and her wise, peremptory rejection of it. Reflect on the work of the American scientist Carleton Gajdusek, who showed the relationship between cannibalism in Papua New ...”

“... painting much, if at all.’ In 1967 she decided the BBC job was ‘too time-consuming’ and took a job at New York’s first ever head shop instead.One night, on the way home to her apartment in St Mark’s Place (four rooms for $67 a month!), she dropped by the Balloon Farm, where she witnessed the Velvet Underground performing its Exploding Plastic ...”

“... happening.’ By 10 p.m. Trump was convinced he had triumphed, with plenty to spare. At 10.30 he took a call from Karl Rove, former election guru to George W. Bush, congratulating him on his win. This sealed his mind against all remaining doubt. As Wolff writes: ‘Why would Rove – a man as in with the Beltway Republican establishment as anybody, who ...”

“... Cavendish himself and by four men who sailed with him, Antony Knivet, a young gentleman volunteer; John Davis, the great navigator; J. Jane, a friend of Davis’s; and Thomas Lodge the poet. Thomas Cavendish was a man of considerable estate but varying fortunes, and like many of his contemporaries he took to the sea to ...”

“... settlement; why the King failed to dissolve or prorogue the Long Parliament; why Englishmen took sides in 1642; why negotiation failed in the same year; why the majesty of Charles I became so diminished that men were ready to fight him. Once these seven effects have been identified, it ‘becomes possible to match cause to effect’ with ...”

“... She began her address – ‘A Naturalist View of Persons’ – by saying: ‘According to John Knox, in his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, it is “repugnant to nature”, as well as “contumely to God, and the subversion of good order”, to promote a woman to any position of superiority in any realm. We in the ...”

“... he doth smite you under the first rib.’ The pamphlet bears the influence of the Leveller leader John Lilburne, a recurring figure in Como’s radical coalition and the subject of Michael Braddick’s commanding and enlivening new biography. Lilburne fought courageously for Parliament as the nation’s defender against tyranny, but turned his eloquence and ...”

“... of our stage!’ His climactic description was elaborated in the Second Folio (1632) by the young John Milton: ‘Thou, in our wonder and astonishment/Hast built thyself a lasting monument.’ Historically, Shakespeare criticism begins with wonder, and that it should have returned there in these millennial times ought not to surprise us. This batch of studies ...”

“... of these critics, but the realisation that writers like Conrad and Kipling, or Jane Austen and John Stuart Mill, thought and wrote without the natives in mind as an audience. An Indian or Jamaican woman reading Kim or Jane Eyre was able to bring to light the usually unstated colonial and male-dominated ideological assumptions behind the form of the novel ...”

“... a hundred years before Parliament paid out about five times that amount to the ‘lone genius’ John Harrison in 1773 for the magnificent marine chronometer that provided a working solution to the longitude problem. The patent Hooke wanted was a type of ‘Letters Patent’ – literally ‘open letters’, sealed but not sealed up, conferring the special ...”

“... was a Bible-banging fundamentalist. When officials in Dayton, Tennessee decided to roast John Scopes for teaching evolution in 1925, they called in the ageing Bryan to prosecute. The week-long trial became a national sensation and reached its climax when the defence attorney, Clarence Darrow, called Bryan to the stand and eviscerated his Biblical ...”

“... famines as reluctantly as the home government did in Ireland. The last large-scale famine in India took place under British rule in Bengal in 1943, exacerbated by Churchill’s insistence that the grain must go to the troops and not to the people who grew it. Tharoor quotes Amartya Sen’s memorable dictum that there has never been a famine in a democracy with ...”