“... one of the affluent dentist sons so deeply regretted in ‘The Closing down of Summer’. He is Alexander MacDonald, known to the extended MacDonald family on Cape Bret-on as gille beag ruadh (‘little red boy’) to distinguish him from his numerous other kinsfolk in clann Chalum Ruaidh (‘the clan of Calum the Red’) with the same name. All are ...”

“... definitively trumpeted by Milton and Locke, and knocked into some sort of final shape by John Stuart Mill? Even before you get to today’s remix of the debate, you cannot help noticing two features of it. First, the zealots today are no longer the progressives on the left – liberals, socialists, trade unionists. Instead they are predominantly on the ...”

“... which is based on that radio programme, and stars Keira Knightley as the feminist historian Sally Alexander. It’s positioned – as Pride (2014) was to Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners in the 1980s, and Made in Dagenham (2010) was to the Ford sewing machinists’ strike of 1968 – to allow viewers some minutes of unchallenging celebration that ...”

“... Smith writes. (One should not forget, however, that other great European liberals, including John Stuart Mill, had profound misgivings about pure democratic government.) It was the liberal leader Giovanni Giolitti who tried gradually to open up politics to wider circles of the population in the last years of the 19th century and the first two decades of the ...”

“... among the English translations of Marx, Lenin and various socialist realist novels, an edition of Alexander Herzen’s novel Who Is to Blame? The title was irresistible and its theme of stupor and futility in the provinces seemed both contemporary and urgent. The ‘tryst with destiny’ promised by Nehru in 1947 seemed further away than ever in an India that ...”

“... Andrew Millar, William Strahan, Thomas Cadell (father and son) and George Robinson in London, and Alexander Kincaid, John Balfour, John Bell and William Creech in Edinburgh, were not ‘mechanicks’ as Strahan once complained, but collaborators in a London-Edinburgh publishing enterprise that put Scotland on the literary map. For John Pinkerton, an Edinburgh ...”

“... where poetry was concerned: Bunting broke a long silence with Briggflatts in 1965 (published by Stuart Montgomery’s Fulcrum Press); Prynne’s Kitchen Poems (1968) was exciting readers in the CB2 postcode; the TLS was publishing concrete poems; and in 1971 Eric Mottram would begin his influential tenure at Poetry Review. But it wasn’t to last. ‘The ...”

“... Alexander Pope’s slur has loomed for centuries over the reputation of Eliza Haywood, the most prominent female author of her day. In The Dunciad, she is the prize of a pissing competition held between talentless hacks:   Who best can send on high The salient spout, far-streaming to the sky; His be yon Juno of majestic size, With cow-like udders, and with ox-like eyes ...”

“... topic makes most sense when the details of diplomacy are placed in a wider context.In 1836, John Stuart Mill claimed in an essay that Lord Melbourne’s government had become ‘smitten with the epidemic disease of Russophobia’, an irrational panic that had triggered an unnecessary increase in defence spending. ‘Russophobia’ has never quite left ...”

“... You don’t hate us in Scotland, Master?’ said Professor John Stuart Blackie, the Teuto-Gaelic classicist, to Jowett of Balliol. ‘We never think of you at all,’ came the lapidary reply. Drafting a sketch for a BBC radio programme on devolution, I was rung by Professor Phil Williams, a colleague at Aberystwyth who is also Plaid Cymru’s spokesman on energy ...”

“... members in Britain – to the wider history of British society is one of the central concerns of Alexander Piatigorsky, an émigré Russian who teaches comparative religion at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Equipped with a phenomenological method and an encyclopedic knowledge of ritual, Piatigorsky is no muck-raker. ‘Who can speak of ...”

“... or ‘populists’ – and had helped to manufacture the bomb that killed Tsar Alexander II in 1881. He was one of the first to be hanged in the subsequent crackdown. Viktor’s father, Leonid, was less distinguished: although he had been a populist sympathiser, he had ended up in Europe for more quotidian reasons, in particular gambling ...”

“... Henry II, fancying a saint in the family, bought Edward’s canonisation from the schismatic Pope Alexander III in 1161 in return for some very welcome support. Henry III rebuilt the abbey in 1245 as a shrine to St Edward – and a royal mausoleum to himself, almost bankrupting the Crown in the process. The abbey’s own website calls him ‘recklessly ...”

“... on the woman question is discussed, among other things, in two recent books, by Gillian Beer and Alexander Welsh. Gillian Beer, with a nice sense of the difficulty of taking up a single-minded position on the question of whether George Eliot was more liberated or more constrained about women’s lives in her fiction than in her life, notes mildly that ...”

“... religious frontiers, and was accustomed to the need for an inter-cultural convivencia, Tudor and Stuart England had, as Elliott remarks, ‘no experience of dealing with substantial ethnic minorities in its midst’. The English preferred, in the words of the governor of Virginia, Sir Francis Wyatt, ‘to have no heathen among us, who at best were but thorns ...”