“... relation between the colour and the wing. It is instructive to compare this argument, which took Berkeley all the way to perceptual idealism, with the argument which in this century has taken some people some of the way with him. Berkeley refuses to allow that there are any mental particulars to be qualified by perceptible qualities. This gives his ...”

“... system as it struggles to grow fast enough to accommodate increases in numbers. Yet that expansion took place relatively smoothly and without much evidence that quality was sacrificed to quantity. Difficult categories of young people have been incorporated into the system. For example, not very long ago, severely handicapped children were considered ineducable ...”

“... community. On arriving in New York, Phebe and Mary went to live with the Broadway tobacconist John Anderson, doing domestic work in exchange for their board. Later, Mary went to work in Anderson’s shop. It was here that she began to be called ‘The Beautiful Cigar Girl’ and became a well-known figure to men involved in the marketing of words and ...”

“... arrogant display of budget that speaks of royal visitations, the finish of the London Marathon, or John Major on walkabout, prospecting for inner-city blight. But on this unearned, mint morning, the fuss is all about real royalty, indigenous royalty: one of our local princes of darkness, a cashmere colonel, is about to be boxed. A mob of expectant necrophiles ...”

“... on this occasion were the rioters themselves, killed by troops, or by gentleman volunteers like John Wilkes, or by the raw alcohol they looted from Catholic-owned distilleries. Food rioters, too, only rarely inflicted serious injury on the farmers, shopkeepers and middlemen whose prices they protested against. And industrial rioters were far more likely to ...”

“... picketing, striking, rioting. And thousands went further, especially after Bloody Sunday, and took up the gun. Even with hindsight, I cannot say that Republicans who resorted to arms were acting ‘irrationally’: their response bore a clear relation to the actions of the state against their communities. Looking through newspaper articles of the time, I ...”

“... Disraeli, mightily put out at the send-up of Coningsby, never spoke to Thackeray again and took his revenge in a later novel. Friends of Thackeray told him that he was losing caste as a novelist by working for Punch, but he needed the money badly – Vanity Fair did not come out until 1847. The Fat Contributor’s finances plummeted when he lost £500 ...”

“... accumulators which had to be carried to the shop to be recharged, and whose acid, if spilled, took the colour out of carpets and the polish off the sideboard; battery sets nevertheless remained in demand even when most people had mains electricity, because wall points were sparely provided, often only one per house. Mains sets were heavily promoted by the ...”

“... are far enough advanced to canonise ‘science fiction by Kilgore Trout ... The poetry of John Shade ... The one and only Don Quixote by the immortal Pierre Menard.’ It’s a bit reminiscent of the hybrid Russian-American world Nabokov invented for Ada. Here, John Kennedy wasn’t shot in Dallas but years ...”

“... in how to write about crime need look no further than Web of Corruption, which tells the story of John Poulson and T. Dan Smith. Raymond Fitzwalter and David Taylor took eight years to research and write their analysis of the most far-reaching corruption trial of this century. The opening summary is startling. Of those ...”

“... through experiment – that electricity could cause movement in inert matter, even corpses. Mary took this a step further by imagining a creature sparked to life from animal bones. Byron’s physician John Polidori (commissioned by John Murray to provide the press at home with scandalous ...”

“... than 9; Tony Benn is leader of the opposition; the Poll Tax has been introduced a decade early; John Lennon is still alive; and personal computers have already been around for twenty years or more. Intercity trains are fast (London to Glasgow in 75 minutes) because Thatcher is ‘fanatical about public transport’, but the trains themselves are ...”

“... and Edmond Halley, those grandees of the Royal Society, and on the other the Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, the doyen of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Johns levels the same complaint against historians of science as against Eisenstein: that they take the subject ‘outside history’ and miss the struggles, practical as well as ...”

“... of historical approaches that sought to ‘read’ politics off social structure. His students took these lessons to heart, but he was moving in another direction. In the last decade, Stedman Jones has in essence become yet another Cambridge historian of political thought, concerned, especially in his 2004 book, An End to Poverty?, to recapture the ...”

“... ghost-hunter, Joseph Glanvill, to Christopher Wren and Charles II. A Hampshire landowner called John Mompesson imprisoned William Drury, a busker and vagrant, and confiscated his drum. Mompesson’s house was then beset by terrible knockings from inside and out. Beds shook, heavy objects were thrown about, children were lifted up in the air. Most of all, a ...”