“... the hands and clothes – are more distinctly Lavaterian in inspiration. (Barbara Hardy and John Carey have illuminatingly anatomised the significance of clothes as an index of character in Dickens and Thackeray, without invoking physiognomy.) But the truth is that after the effective build-up in the background chapters which comprise half of his ...”

“... is complicated. Every crypto transaction since the invention of bitcoin has been recorded on a freely accessible ledger known as a blockchain. Even armchair sleuths can track the movements of crypto between wallets. ‘Whale Alert’, the best known tracker of ‘large and interesting transactions’, has 2.5 million followers on X. The simplest way to ...”

“... from acknowledging their debts: a desperate solution, for other Italian scholars were, in fact, freely cited, and there are enough examples for us to know that such disparagement did not have the effect which is here raised into general principle. Fisch has another answer. As soon as ‘Vichian ideas’ appear, they are quickly turned into presumed ...”

“... denouncing their parents. However, she does find what she calls the ‘young avenger’ type, freely and recklessly denouncing neighbours, teachers and schoolmates in the hope of becoming a hero like Pavlik. She also rightly mentions the number of denunciations made because people were themselves afraid of being denounced and usefully illustrates the ...”

“... of Robin’s unconcealed antipathy.’ Cook’s other antipathies are noted, against Bob Cryer, John Prescott and Roy Hattersley: ‘Try as I may, I cannot remember what the agony was all about.’ His failed ambitions are mulled over. After John Smith’s death he considered his options and decided he did not have enough ...”

“... Nearby was Portman Square, another highly-sought rectangle, the contractor for which was John Elwes, scion of a family of congenital and pathological misers, himself one of the London rich. For a long period these proud squares stood incongruously on the edge of open country, highwayman-haunted. There was much to be said for a mansion in Grosvenor ...”

“... In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare ...”

“... but as home secretary he came into his own.One of Sidmouth’s spies, a man called John Castle, was on the action committee responsible for organising the huge and supposedly peaceful meeting of reformers on Spa Fields that was to be addressed by the mellifluous Orator Hunt. Castle tirelessly whipped up the labourers who had just been laid off ...”

“... character’ of language. That phrase comes in the title of a deeply representative book by John Wilkins. It is altogether fitting that a leading figure in the Royal Society should have been preoccupied by such inquiries. One recalls that in the Grand Academy of Lagado the mechanical operation of words figures more largely than experiments with mice ...”

“... it’s plausible to assume that taking politics less seriously translates into experimenting more freely with one’s ballot. That said, rising volatility could also indicate the opposite: that citizens think more carefully about their choices; that they don’t blindly follow a party allegiance they may well have inherited from their parents. For ...”

“... was ascribed to Satan. In the first systematic treatise devoted to the topic, published in 1637, John Sym, a Puritan, was still able to attribute suicide to ‘the strong impulse, powerfull motions, and command of the Devill’. But natural causes were increasingly being blamed: melancholy, a dysfunction of the hypochondriac organs, folly, a foul ...”

“... other books – Meghan Daum’s The Problem with Everything; Laura Kipnis’s Unwanted Advances; John McWhorter’s Woke Racism – but Nelson is unusual in wanting to be read as a good-faith actor. She signals her allegiance to the etiquette of political correctness and believes in its values, but she thinks we should find a middle way, one that doesn’t ...”

“... William Gladstone or Abraham Lincoln ordering the murder of foreign leaders or the overthrow of freely-elected governments. The Duke of Wellington even refused to allow the guns to fire at Napoleon during the Battle of Waterloo. Bismarck holidayed in Austria just days before the outbreak of the Austro-Prussian war in 1866 and Lord Salisbury visited France ...”

“... of the town without consulting him. She never comes back. It is shrugged off very casually: King John (somebody told me) Said to a man he knew: ‘If people go down to the end of the town, well, what can anyone do?’ I used to recite it (in my day children were called on to torture visitors in this way), but while I enjoyed the rhythm and the pace, it gave ...”

“... its own.’ ‘The third sector and the third party could go together.’ But co-ops, they freely concede, do conjure up one or another of two dispiriting pictures. One is of the Co-op itself, an unenticing alternative to Sainsbury or Waitrose or the larger Marks and Spencer. The other is of disemployed artisans, left behind by technical change and ...”