“... pulled a face if you told her you were going on holiday there. Before Christmas she and her sister took off for South America and this last week the market men in Inverness Street got a postcard from Stephanie in Peru, which they pinned up on one of the stalls.Then yesterday the new postman told us that having run out of money in Peru she and her sister had ...”

“... of history the history of political thought has travelled since the middle of the 20th century. John Pocock is often associated with the Cambridge School, with good reason. He took his doctorate at Cambridge, where he came into contact with Laslett, and has played a leading role, alongside Skinner, in the contextualist ...”

“... of America for its behaviour in Vietnam could have implications for sterling. On 16 June 1965, John Stevens of the British Embassy in Washington wrote that ‘the administration still do not think that a devaluation of sterling would bring down the US dollar but this attitude may change as their hopes of strengthening the US balance of payments are ...”

“... Irish, many of them young women. Among its employees was my grandfather Sean (known in Britain as John), who drove a District Line train until ill-health forced him to retire in the 1970s. Irish muscle was most useful to the expanding building trade, reviving the clichéd image of the Irish navvy. The Irish were good workers who ...”

“... not where politics were concerned, and was rather slow in advancing his political outlook. It took him years to pay attention to the threat of the Bomb, years to notice the Holocaust, and decades to accept Stalin’s crimes. He also had a bizarre near aversion to the Civil Rights movement, which was active around the time he was enjoying his greatest ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... What​ have the Romans ever done for us?’ John Cleese asks in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. His audience, not realising his question is rhetorical, replies: aqueducts, sanitation, medicine, public order, etc etc. Guy de la Bédoyère, on the other hand, doesn’t need a list: the Romans’ most important legacy, he suggests in his new book, is literacy, and specifically the habit of written memorialisation ...”

“... scientific travellers – including Darwin, who was deeply influenced by Humboldt’s example and took his books with him when he embarked on his own voyage of discovery thirty years later. Humboldt lived for more than fifty years after his return to Europe in 1804. Though he often contemplated other expeditions he made only one more extended journey, a ...”

“... black hair and dark moustache, produced a quirky resemblance to Lenin. Although his biographer John Bew finds the likeness ‘somewhat forced’, he notes that contemporary observers as different in their politics as George Orwell and the Daily Mail made sport with the superficial similarity. The British Lenin might all too easily have become the David ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that abilities as spontaneous and exuberant as his could be kept unfailingly under tight control. John Hay commented from New Hampshire, after Kipling had paid him a three-day visit in 1895: ‘How a man can keep up so intense an intellectual life without going to Bedlam is amazing. He rattled off the framework of about forty stories while he was with ...”

“... protector of Israel. Saddam’s War and Unholy Babylon have been put together with great speed. John Bulloch and Harvey Morris, the authors of the first book, and Adel Darwish, one of the authors of the second, all write for the Independent, and regular readers of that paper will not find in Saddam’s War much (except for the earlier history, whose ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was lodged in the greater prison of Colchester, that ‘grim and strong fortress’; this time it took him a fortnight to break out, which he did ‘vi et armis videlicet gladiis langodebeves et daggariis ... et sic extra eandem gaolam felonice ... evaserit’, ‘by armed force, that is to say with swords, daggers and langues de boeuf, and so feloniously ...”

“... 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 ...”