“... trustees would not countenance an agnostic headmaster. Mary Ward intervened. Her publisher, George Smith, enriched by Elsmere and its successors, was the proprietor of the Cornhill Magazine. Thanks to Mrs Ward’s influence, Leonard was taken on in 1901. He would eventually become editor.Released from her matron’s duties at Charterhouse, Julia took out a ...”

“... down and going down, though there’s no doubt which one the audience prefers. 22 January. Take Richard Buckle’s autobiography, The Most Upsetting Woman, out of the London Library in order to refresh my memory of the Diaghilev exhibition in 1954. Buckle had organised it and put it on first at the Edinburgh Festival (a much smarter venue then than it is ...”

“... turn one of them off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly ...”

“... which would give participants ‘a chance to experience the disciplines of collective choice’. Richard Holme points out that this in turn will involve major constitutional and political changes: above all, enormously enhancing our access to information while simultaneously circumscribing the capacity of the state to behave secretively and ...”

“... he was taught and befriended – as were his Birmingham contemporaries Walter Allen and Reggie Smith – by a young lecturer in the Classics Department, Louis MacNeice. Reed had a remarkable speaking voice and a gift for mimicry (and for assuming the accents of a class not his own), and as an undergraduate he acted in and produced plays, which may have led ...”

“... of the drug traffic; a century and a half ago, a card-carrying progressive would have sworn, as Richard Cobden did, by phrenology. When invited to lend our ears to what is obvious to all men of good will, phrenology should always come to mind. At an individual level, today’s Lib Dems are hardly rooted in the great continuities of history. A 1992 survey of ...”

“... Coleridge. Eugen Oswald translated Humboldt into English and became tutor to the children of both Richard Cobden and Edward VII. Eleanor Marx translated Flaubert and Ibsen. Johannes Ronge introduced Froebel’s kindergarten ideas to England and Malwida von Meysenburg became a pioneer of women’s education, joining forces with Barbara Leigh ...”

“... from her as Dugdale’s were from him, but as close as Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were to Richard Nixon. The ‘misunderstandings’ over Westlands were attributed to those civil servants such as Mr Bernard Ingham and Mr Charles Powell whom Mrs Thatcher sees many times each day. Isn’t this something we should be concerned about? Three decades after ...”

“... the Declaration was, in fact, a close disciple of the Scottish Enlightenment, influenced by Reid, Smith, Hume, and above all by Francis Hutcheson. This conclusion emerges from what is presented as a study of Jefferson’s reading and writing joined to a detailed analysis of the 18th-century meanings of key expressions in Jefferson’s draft. In so ...”

“... music has also stormed the citadel of literary fiction, and characters in novels such as Karline Smith’s Moss Side Massive and Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity are identified, and minutely differentiated, by their music tastes. The characters in The Black Album tend not to be pinned down by their music tastes. Chili, the central character’s brother, is, in ...”

“... in 1883 of an English translation – a project fronted by the Orientalising self-promoter Richard Burton – there have been a great number of illustrated versions. To many, the Kāmasūtra’s connection with India is almost incidental. Most do not know what the text as a whole is like: the best-known portions take up only one of its seven ...”

“... found in The Girl from Chicago; for Green, the rival entertainers in Swing represent Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters, the two poles of cultural autonomy and assimilation. In 1928, a combination of factors – Hollywood’s penetration of the race market, the novelty of sound films, the withholding of credit that presaged the stockmarket crash – drove ...”

“... than on the sociological context of the environment in which this message was received. Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ is only the most obvious product of a rich and neglected interaction within the Enlightenment of naturalistic explanation with the more distant and depersonalised versions of Christian providentialism. There are some very notable ...”

“... primarily on a trove of data assembled by a ‘control-freak’ landlord (Hindle’s phrase), Sir Richard Newdigate, 2nd baronet, an ancestor of the landowner for whom Eliot’s father acted as agent. Provoked by a sense of rivalry with neighbouring landowners, Newdigate sent elected officials (called ‘jurors’) knocking on every door in the parish to ...”

“... review of the 2007 exhibition of his work at the American Folk Art Museum, in which Roberta Smith, senior art critic at the New York Times, declared Ramírez ‘one of the greatest artists of the 20th century’. Ramírez had an indelible style built on a supreme sense of economy and shot through with a mix of sly humour and sunny optimism that coats ...”