“... Benjamin Franklin wondered about the constitutions of those ‘who live on the planet Mercury’. Tom Paine used the plurality of worlds as an argument against Christianity–redemption implies uniqueness. The extraterrestrial assumption had the support of people who believed in science, as well as of those who believed in the literal truth of the Bible, and ...”

“... rest away. Plum-picking explains why Dickens’s dealings with Chapman and Hall and Bradbury and Evans have survived, while the bulk of their papers have disappeared (some B&E materials washed up in the Punch archive; those of C&H were, apparently, thrown out when the firm was taken over by Methuen in 1938). Only after 1945 did large libraries become ...”

“... Marx – naturally – was the real Karl. Right now, columnist, game-show pundit and biographer of Tom Driberg, Francis Wheen is here to tell us that all the previous practitioners and theoreticians of Marx’s work – both the governments and the academics (in economics, history, geography, sociology, literature) who professed themselves Marxists – have ...”

“... alone as the partial contrast in the comparative clause:* I liked her better than I do.* Tom saw Betty more often than he will.But power there grows out of the symbol of an asterisk, the star-chamber symbol for ‘unacceptable’.Not but what there is a regular attempt to palliate the charge. It is a pity even to seem to be agreeing with Roy ...”

“... second wife, who was later to become successively the wife of Gilbert de Préville Colvile and of Tom, the fourth Baron Delamere. Gwladys, Lady Delamere (Tom’s stepmother, wife of the third Baron, who broke the news to Broughton that ‘Joss is wildly in love with Diana’). Plus a number of walk-on, climb-on or lie-down ...”

“... Mantel, Sarah Waters, Madeline Miller), classicists (Robin Lane Fox, Bettany Hughes), historians (Tom Holland), who salute her muscular resurrections of the classical world, and gay men who see her as a pioneer in her writing about homosexual relationships. Along with hundreds of other gay men, many of them closeted, the writer and classicist Daniel ...”

“... He was still editing the Faber series Projections (13 volumes in all, aided by the late Matthew Evans and Walter Donohue), which was an unprecedented forum for filmmakers to talk at length about what they do. I co-edited Volume 4, with Tom Luddy, only because Boorman was occupied at the time shooting Beyond Rangoon ...”

“... and Mississippi senator Trent Lott, both seeking a second term, and Don Sundquist of Tennessee and Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, two Republican gubernatorial candidates. ‘Mr President, that would be a conflict of interest. If you want me to do political work for you, you’ll have to ask me after the November election.’ That’s what I didn’t say. You ...”

“... than acting on the stage’ in the description of the political contacts-man and Astor consigliere Tom Jones, using words of the sort that later stuck like labels to Waldorf’s son David wherever he went. Waldorf’s wife, whom he met on an Atlantic crossing, was the opposite. Variously compared to a gnat, a grasshopper and a Chinese cracker, Nancy Langhorne ...”

“... 227 pp., £2.95, 27 September, 0 14 007458 9), Nineteen Eighty-Four and All’s Well? by Tom Winnifrith and William Whitehead (Macmillan, 104 pp., £15 and £5.95, 4 April, 033 33493 0), Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (Secker, new edition, 241 pp., £7.95, 3 January, 0 436 35019 X), Nineteen-Eighty-Four by George Orwell (Penguin, new ...”

“... Callaghan, that dire waxwork who embodied the terrible fate of the old dreams of social democracy: Tom Nairn’s phrase about ‘the full medicine pill misery’ of having to ‘behold the gartered Callaghan’ swims back to mind. A similar unease overcomes me each time Morgan writes of the gale of derision directed at Foot’s Worzel Gummidge appearance and ...”

“... by Whitaker without agreeing with his analysis or conclusions – which is the position taken by Tom Hopkinson in his foreword to the book: It is a mistake for minority press writers to attack objectivity and impartiality on the grounds that objectivity is a ‘recent invention, a pseudo-scientific myth, and not even the most diligent journalist can hope to ...”

“... and emailed Boris Johnson’s senior special adviser, Sheridan Westlake, and called and texted Tom Scholar, the permanent secretary at the Treasury. He also contacted John Glen and Jesse Norman, two MPs who had served under him and were now ministers in Sunak’s department.Despite Cameron’s efforts – and at least ten meetings with Treasury officials ...”

“... of the British press is often exhilarating. No doubt Murdoch’s treatment of her husband, Harry Evans, axed from the Times, was at the front of her mind. Even without that spur the verdict of guilty of just about everything would have been returned. Yet without a reliance on the press’s archive this would be a thinner book. Brown successfully excepts ...”

“... Pareto, Weber, Simmel, Mann), anthropology (Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard) or literary studies (Bakhtin, de Man, Barthes). All these foundational figures are European. The grand American exception is Chomsky, who revolutionised the study of linguistics, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Milton Friedman in ...”