“... With the leading post-war Tory thinker in politics thus consigned to the scrapheap, Chris Patten, William Waldegrave and Francis Pym inevitably go the same way. These omissions might have been ascribed to a bizarre decision by Honderich to disallow books by all practising politicians, were it not that he does include Roy Hattersley and Gordon Brown. Much the ...”

“... to be detected on other planets are single-celled microbes. These are beginning to look like the masters of creation. Stephen Jay Gould points out that the first two billion years of life on Earth was the age of bacteria, and nothing much has changed since. Taxonomists used to think of evolution as a ladder, from microbes to us, and then as a tree, with ...”

“... It has been an influential cult novel: the Beats imitated its breathless style; Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’ (1963) is clearly based on the tub-thumping final chapter. It was turned down by Hollywood studios 17 times, on the grounds that it was ‘too depressing’; Buñuel was set to direct it in 1965 but the funding collapsed. When Trumbo himself ...”

“... moral philosophers based their arguments on self-evident truths. (An unclerical example is Sir William Temple, in his essay on Epicurus.) It was also commonly agreed that few men bowed voluntarily to the constraints of morality; nearly all had to be driven into it by supernatural warnings. Objectors, like Shaftesbury and his followers, were audible but ...”

“... essays. Out of the window – if these experts are right – goes Montaigne. To the bonfire with William Hazlitt, closely followed by Max Beerbohm, Sainte-Beuve and John Aubrey. A brusque kiss-off to Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, La Bruyère and the best of Mencken, not to mention Svetonius’s Lives of the Caesars; and into the garbage goes Samuel ...”

“... we may consider the following passage dating from 1895 on a painting then in the collection of Sir William Farrer but today in the Ashmolean Museum: perhaps the freshest and most charming, as well as the earliest of all Montagna’s existing works ... the child is thin-haired, large-headed, and chubby-limbed. His ear has the nick in the cheek so rarely absent ...”

“... is perfect, showing, in Angelica Goodden’s words, ‘a warm and seductive romanticism’. Mrs William Chinnery is, by comparison, a little bland. Vigée Le Brun was at her best with romantic young girls and attractive men. The sublime was beyond her register: it is hard to take her picture of Madame de Staël strumming her lyre seriously, and when, late ...”

“... a postmistress and a pot-boy (Bob Gliddery in Our Mutual Friend), seven surgeons, three dance-masters, a reporter (David Copperfield), a tobacconist (Mrs Chivery in Little Dorrit), two fishermen, 32 teachers, four blacksmiths, six undertakers, 45 lawyers and sixteen landladies, several magistrates, a weaver (Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times), an ...”

“... lyrics, set to be sung by (and sometimes it seems written in collaboration with) Henry and William Lawes. These poems often have a perfectly unambiguous clarity of theme and language as though they are a single musical line designed to stand out from its setting. Herrick’s lyrical simplicity and directness of expression had an enormous influence on ...”

“... the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang/With grimful glee …’ Frank Auerbach to William Feaver And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang With grimful glee: ‘This life so free Is the thing for me!’ And the constable smiled, and said no word. Thomas Hardy, ‘At the Railway Station, Upway’ I remember​ the first time I saw, or ...”

“... are newcomers to MoMA).* Elderfield has worked in P&S for years, under the directorships of both William Rubin (1973-88) and Kirk Varnedoe (1988-2000). Yet Elderfield’s final show in the old building, Modern Starts (2000), was cause for concern: a post-historical hodgepodge of disparate works placed together in lookalike groupings under such generic titles ...”

“... as Edward: hair quiffed, face powder a shade or two too light, modelled, I thought, on Prince William on a night out at Boujis, laughing fondly down at Kate Middleton when she can’t help herself being middle-class. There’s a little bit of martial-arts-type leaping, some tiny vampire flashbacks done, wittily, like Nosferatu, but that apart, the film is ...”

“... and destabilising contribution to late Elizabethan politics of a succession of Catholic writers, William Allen and Robert Parsons (or Persons) among them, who were bent on destroying or discrediting the regime, or securing a successor to Elizabeth who would reintroduce or at least tolerate their religion. Lake is not impressed by the recent claim that ...”

“... a group of servant children – ‘he’ is a young Black servant – taking the piss out of their masters and mistresses. It’s a kind of purposive fooling around that recalls the fun dances, which are also dangerous games, shared by the narrator and her friend Tracey in Swing Time (2016), or the goofing off that always says something about what it is to be ...”

“... his life. Frederick the Great died in 1786, to be succeeded by the notably unenlightened Frederick William II; and if the storming of the Bastille seemed to herald an enlightened age in France (‘I have seen the glory of the world,’ Kant said), the subsequent course of the Revolution was not so gratifying. A generation later, however, the amalgam of ...”