“... in 1821 that the population had surged from ten to fourteen million over the previous two decades, William Cobbett responded that ‘a man that can suck that in will believe, literally believe, that the moon is made of green cheese.’ As late as 1931, it was discovered that one enumerator, committed to a mental hospital, had prepared fictitious returns in ...”

“... parasitic organism which causes one of the world’s great killer diseases: ‘Mosquito Day’. Or William Castle (1897-1990), a young resident at Boston City Hospital who knew from earlier work that pernicious anaemia involved the production of too few red blood cells, that vast quantities of raw or slightly cooked liver resolved the problem, and that ...”

“... Dylan Thomas’s​ foredoomed premature death feels intrinsic to his late romanticism, part of what made him the ‘Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive’, as he labelled himself. But he could have escaped the legend to which he had devoted such energies. As Paul Ferris’s excellent biography established some time back, while Thomas was certainly in a bad way, his death was down to a medical blunder ...”

“... has suffered repeated jolts to its 16th and 17th-century foundations. In The Political World of Thomas Wentworth – a distinguished collection of essays on one Stuart minister who advanced British hegemony – Peter Lake urges historians not to link Early Modern crises ‘directly to contemporary concerns about Northern Ireland, the union with Scotland and ...”

“... few hymnodists who have been accepted or half-accepted into the literary canon – George Herbert, Thomas Ken, Watts, Charles Wesley – but many less celebrated names, such as Sir Robert Grant, William Walsham How, William Chatterton Dix: Grant (‘O worship the King, all glorious ...”

“... be not the intolerable wrestle with words, but, as it were, a further wrestle with the wrestle. Thomas Mann, like Hill, an artist wary of the claims and capacities of art, lamented that his Doctor Faustus was ‘joylessly earnest, not artistically happy’, and Hill’s two new books certainly tread the gravel of the joyless. Yet in the past, Hill has made ...”

“... to a different publisher, Richard Crosby. He paid £10 for it, but didn’t publish it. In 1810, Thomas Egerton agreed to publish Sense and Sensibility on commission: Austen paid for her own printing and some advertising, and it found its readers. But what if Egerton had been of the same mind as Crosby? Of if Austen hadn’t been able to raise the ...”

“... study of Aristotle’s phronesis led the poet back towards a native American pragmatism, recalling William James at Harvard but also providing critical anticipations of Richard Rorty. The truth is no doubt messier than these formulations suggest – say, that Eliot after a time was content to assimilate rather than extend his philosophical learning, but that ...”

“... end of their correspondence, which spanned years 1851-79, John Ruskin, who hitherto had addressed Thomas Carlyle more or less in terms of deferential formality (‘Dear Mr Carlyle’), suddenly shifted to ‘Dearest Papa’, signing himself ‘Ever your loving disciple-son’. Whatever the immediate reasons for the change, it simply made explicit Ruskin’s ...”

“... In April 1792, William Pitt, the ‘heaven-born minister’ as his Tory supporters liked to call him, made what we can now recognise as one of the first of many attempts to cast off the perception that the Tories are the nasty party. The slave trade, he told the Commons, was ‘the greatest practical evil that ever has afflicted the human race’, and a ‘stigma on our national character ...”

“... by the number of high-level CIA officers who had signed off on the 10 October cable, including Thomas Karamessines, deputy director of the clandestine wing of the CIA; J.C. King, chief of the clandestine wing’s Western Hemisphere Division; and William Hood, at that time chief of operations under King. Roman said she ...”

“... and nourished with intellectual fodder. ‘Those who wish to revive the West,’ concludes Mr Thomas, ‘should recognise that one of the benefits of a study of history is that it is always possible to reverse, as Plato put it, an apparently fatal tendency towards decay, however late the hour …’ The weight of our planet’s unfinished history ...”

“... of opinion. What were once social democratic parties now rely largely on the votes of what Thomas Piketty has called the ‘Brahmin left’: the liberal-minded yet privileged section of society, whose one shared experience is higher education.In recent years, as liberalism has faltered, universities have been dragged into political conflicts to which ...”

“... journeys and drowsy hammocks’, and Youth (which contained Heart of Darkness), reviewed by William Beach Thomas, who had robustly little time for Conrad’s dense pessimism. Two years later, on Chekhov’s death, Francis Gribble magniloquently wavered on the fine point of the Russian’s stature: ‘he may or may not ...”

“... between defiance and misgiving. In 1810 Shelley went to Oxford, where he met and beguiled Thomas Jefferson Hogg, and languished over his rejection by his cousin Harriet Grove, who was frightened by the unorthodoxy of his ideas; he was soon sent down for co-authoring, with Hogg, ‘The Necessity of Atheism’ (though he wavered about acknowledging his ...”