“... John Carey’s new book, like his last one, The Intellectuals and the Masses, is a little swizzle-stick perfectly designed for flattening airy literary bubbles. Surprisingly, it is likable, wise and often right, the more so in tending to contradict The Intellectuals and the Masses, which had none of these qualities ...”

“... 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 – Greensill wasn’t given access to the CCFF scheme, but it did ...”

“... had dabbled in professional music and drama, taking leading roles in a Harlem production of Simon the Cyrenian and a play about voodoo called Taboo, and singing bass with the Four Harmony Kings in the Broadway musical, Shuffle along. In 1922 he had gone to England to appear in Mrs Patrick Campbell’s production of Voodoo. There is something diagnostic ...”

“... simple identification of the praiser of Shakespeare, upon whose words the whole dedication turns: John Webster, in the note ‘To the Reader’ before The White Devil. Browning’s Elizabethanised play has its affinities with Webster: moreover, it was canny of him to emend Webster’s prefatory words so as to reduce them to a single-minded praise of ...”

“... to get rid of Wilson, but it was interrupted by a message to call at Number 10 immediately. The simon-pure doctor abandoned his knife, fork and napkin (not to mention Mr MacLennan) and made his way up Whitehall, where the man he was plotting to bring down proceeded to offer him the post of Minister for the Navy. He accepted. Dr Owen records that this was ...”

“... babies came from were told that they popped out from their mother’s armpit. In the 18th century, John Hill wrote that ‘whenever we read of Virgins got with Child by Rivers, by Dragons, by golden Showers, &c’ we ought to be sceptical. It was really ‘Wind, nothing in the World but Wind’. There was the prosaic business of making a baby – everyone knew ...”

“... the result a ‘semi-forgery’, and by skilful detective work he has spotted the probable forger: John Toland, an Irishman born in 1670 who was apparently the illegitimate son of a Roman Catholic priest. The real Ludlow was a fierce Calvinist who believed that his escape from England had been due to the Lord having ‘hid [him] in the hollow of His ...”

“... practice. It is as if we had only the lyrics, without recordings or melodies, of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Joan Baez – and those only in indifferent Portuguese translations. Most of their power and all of their subtlety would vanish. For similar reasons, the troubadours have more often been honoured as cultural pioneers than admired as ...”

“... period. Among the characters who reappear in Dixon’s book is the sadistic slave-master Simon Legree, who opportunistically turns Republican, gets elected governor of North Carolina, steals a fortune and relocates to New York City. The Leopard’s Spots sold more than a million copies; Dixon’s subsequent Civil War-Reconstruction novel The ...”

“... generation after his death. His contemporaries Goethe and Darwin admired him; so would Thoreau and John Muir. Many places and things in the natural world now bear his name: a current in the Pacific Ocean, towns in Kansas, Nebraska and Saskatchewan, a county in California, a university in Berlin, not to mention a penguin, a bat, a cactus, an orchid, a mushroom ...”

“... and political passage through the first half of the 19th century: Schiller, Hegel, Saint-Simon, Fourier, George Sand, Feuerbach, Louis Blanc and, crucially, Proudhon. The young Herzen, awed and fascinated by European ideas and achievements, tended to blame the tsars for his country’s pitiable backwardness. The Slavophiles and gradualists who ...”

“... an indigenous British current of it had got under way, passed from Coleridge and Carlyle to John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold. From this radical-Romantic viewpoint, industrial capitalism was to be condemned for stifling a creativity which the arts, above all, most finely exemplified. Art was the enemy of alienation, craftsmanship the antithesis of ...”

“... to concede. The question now became: what causes the secular acceleration of the Moon? Pierre-Simon Laplace discovered in 1776 that orbits would eventually degrade if, in contrast to Newton’s theory of instantaneous action at a distance, gravitational forces took time to propagate. Laplace’s insight was that the cumulative effect of the planets on the ...”

“... should be left at his side.) Or perhaps it is both simpler and more complicated. ‘Writing,’ Simon Goldhill declares in his slippery new book about the Bensons, ‘is a pathological response to being in a family.’ There are​ other questions worth asking. Why do we care? What exactly is the point of the Bensons? ‘A very odd brotherhood,’ the ...”

“... of Desert Island Discs’ ten best episodes. Many included Yoko Ono on being hated and witnessing John Lennon’s murder, the actor Stephen Graham on his suicide attempt, Maya Angelou on childhood trauma, Simon Cowell boasting, Alfred Wainwright on his last walk in the Lakes as his eyes failed (‘the mountains wept for me ...”