“... among others, Foucault, Habermas, Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre and Derrida. Currently Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard, he came of philosophical age in the early Fifties, in a milieu where the very idea of professing, say, a ‘general theory of value’ – never mind composing ‘autobiographical ...”

“... idealist. Under Haley’s enlightened rule, the triumvirate of Etienne Amyot, Leslie Stokes and George Barnes built an inspirational Third Programme that had initially to withstand a number of technical troubles – among them, the appropriation by Soviet Latvia of the waveband originally assigned to it – before it became the ‘envy of the ...”

“... Crown, and set the tone for British Neo-Latin verse in the later 16th century. The Latin works of George Buchanan won him an international audience, and pulses of Protestant resistance theory run through his Latin dramas on Biblical themes. In the first half of the 17th century most major English poets – Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Crashaw, Cowley – were ...”

“... Even so, it is crammed with intriguing data. We learn that it was the journalist Walter Lippmann who introduced the term ‘stereotype’ into American culture; that Marx always judged the mental qualities of a stranger from the shape of his head, which may be carrying materialism a bit too far; and that so-called nigger minstrels in the ...”

“... 1938, and won by four lengths by Seabiscuit. He was ridden on that occasion by a back-up jockey, George Woolf, his regular jockey, Red Pollard, having broken his leg galloping a wild young racehorse as a favour to a friend. Seabiscuit is well aware of the cultural baggage the horse was carrying with him: the ‘little horse’ drew more newspaper coverage in ...”

“... Welles anticipated Andy Warhol, who also enjoys a posthumous existence as a movie character.) George Orson Welles was born in 1915 and appeared first as the wunderkind whose Shakespeare productions – the ‘Fascist’ Julius Caesar, the ‘voodoo’ Macbeth – dazzled New York theatregoers in the 1930s and who, when not spooking radio listeners as the ...”

“... and bills of sale, Marks and his team of researchers unearthed some unexpected gems. The diary of George Hunter White, a dead Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent, was particularly startling. White had worked as Gottlieb’s fixer in the underworlds of New York and San Francisco, conducting drug experiments on unknowing subjects in brothels or at parties he held ...”

“... royal work, was twenty years in the making, but thought so dreadful that Victoria’s grandson George V had it destroyed (it lives on in various copies and mezzotints). She had laid out her vision for the picture in her journal: ‘the solitude, the sport, and the Highlanders in the water &c. will be, as Landseer says, a beautiful historical ...”

“... alone at night. Fretting about her safety, Kennedy was talked into arranging a lobotomy by Walter Freeman, head of neurology at George Washington University and chief evangelist for the procedure. Freeman insisted that it could cure Rosemary’s tantrums, irritability and violence; in fact the operation was a ...”

“... their own dignity and secure their own liberty. But as one of the leading historians of slavery, Walter Johnson, recently observed, much of the newer scholarship has been incorporated into the triumphalist narrative. The reductio ad absurdum of this process was George W. Bush’s speech in the summer of 2003, on Gorée ...”

“... themselves at the mercy of some ruthless tribe of Iroquois or Sioux. Noting the success of Sir Walter Scott, from whose life and writing he learned so much, Cooper found in fiction a means of restoring his family’s fortunes. His most famous creation was the frontiersman Natty Bumppo, also known as Leatherstocking (on account of his leggings), Hawk-eye ...”

“... she finds, were met over and over again with an excessive response. From the execution of George William Gordon, a member of the Jamaican National Assembly, for allegedly inciting the 1865 rebellion at Morant Bay, to the conviction for conspiracy of the Meerut defendants in India in 1933 for organising a railway strike, the dynamic of rebellion and ...”

“... but excitedly shameless (‘Ho, everyone that thirsteth’), or it can be the equivalent of George V’s sentiments on the subject (‘Shot? So quick, so clean an ending?). One wonders how its early readers could have mistaken the meaning of that poem, No 44 in A Shropshire Lad, or that of No 45 – ‘If it chance your eye offend you’ – but ...”

“... to withdrawal in Vietnam was meant to ‘neutralise’ supporters of the Southern Democrat George Wallace, who was trying to get the 1972 nomination. If Nixon pulled out too quickly, he warned, Wallace’s 13 per cent of the 1968 vote – he had run as an independent candidate on a segregationist ticket and split the right-wing vote – could balloon ...”

“... presented itself to him as an opportunity for experiment. While thousands were weeping at George Whitefield’s outdoor meeting in Philadelphia, Franklin, instead of getting closer to hear the preacher better, walked away to reach the limit of Whitefield’s voice and so calculate the maximum number of people who could fit within the area – and ...”