“... but the most interestingly historical of them, Y Gododdín, does so only tangentially. Whatever John Morris and Leslie Alcock may have written in the 1970s and 1980s, the evidence provides ‘no space … for an “Age of Arthur” during which a victorious British emperor-like figure held back the barbarian hordes’. That image really dates back to the ...”

“... the prism. No one around you can see it – it’s almost a hallucination. David Hockney, who took up drawing with a modern camera lucida in 1999, described it in Secret Knowledge (2001) as projecting not ‘a real image of the subject, but an illusion of one in the eye’:At first I found the camera lucida very difficult to use … When you move your ...”

“... some time between 1859 and 1919, the world contracted a disease which no one ever took the trouble to diagnose because the symptoms were too subtle – blending in with the events of history, no different one by one but altogether – fatal.’ On this model, and on our topic, we might say something like: Suppose some time between 1895 (when ...”

“... course of the week. The majority’s loyalties remained with the Home Rule party and its leader, John Redmond. Ever since Parnell had been hailed ‘the uncrowned king of Ireland’ in the 1880s, the majority of nationalists had supported the parliamentary campaign for Home Rule, hoping that Westminster could be persuaded or cajoled into devolving ...”

“... so courteous as to be practically indistinguishable from his butler’. So the next morning they took the precaution of leaving Widener’s car a quarter of a mile from Barnes’s house. When they arrived, the door was opened and, ‘after careful scrutiny by a man who could be properly described as a roughneck (one could have struck a match on his neck), we ...”

“... then subjugated other continents, French and above all British colonisers and their home audiences took the Athenian line. Cultural and physical differences became rungs on a moral ladder. Being ‘heathen’ and not Christian kept most strangers near the ladder’s foot. But the English added another rung: mockery. Wearing grass skirts, worshipping ...”

“... victory. This was later challenged by historians on the right such as Correlli Barnett and John Charmley, who claimed that the war was a calamity for Britain, with consequences from near national bankruptcy and humiliating dependence on American financial support to industrial decline, Soviet domination of much of Europe and the loss of empire.But ...”

“... grudges, he now sometimes takes part in respectful online discussions with former enemies such as John McDonnell, who stood against him for the Labour leadership in 2007. This relatively short biography devotes four chapters to Brown’s life after Downing Street. Here, as throughout the book, the tone is occasionally critical but essentially ...”

“... noted mechanist philosopher and musicologist), by the chief architect of the Royal Society, John Wilkins, and by John Locke. For Mersenne certainty is possible only in mathematics because it is ‘a science of the imagination or of pure intellect’. But since we cannot penetrate the nature of bodies and what occurs ...”

“... a sadistic buffoon and could never have been tolerated even by the long-suffering Labour Party. John Wheatley was the intellectual and organising genius behind the Clydesiders, but you have only to watch the surviving newsreels to see why Maxton had to be the leader of that group, and you only have to study Maxton’s confused utterances to see how he could ...”

“... that perhaps only a Russian historian could write. The last two chapters are devoted to Germany. John Connelly looks at a cache of letters to the local leadership of the Nazi Party in Eisenach, and illustrates once again how diverse were the concerns articulated. Soldiers wrote from the Front, for example, to complain on behalf of their wives. And he has ...”

“... must have had a good deal to do with it. The phrase ‘ways of seeing’ crops up, reminding us of John Berger and his allegedly penetrating double squint. The authorial assumption which remains unquestioned at the end of the book – after 350 pages in which the word ‘spatial’ appears rarely fewer than three times per paragraph and sometimes twice in the ...”

“... and we spent the end of November that year burying them – the first deaths in our lives that took for most of us boomers. All the other TV types got shot on Gunsmoke on a Friday and turned up on Bonanza, looking fit by Sunday night. But Kennedy was one of those realities of death my father must have been talking about and though we saw his casket and ...”

“... of his life the only significant intellectual to write to Hobbes, apart from his faithful friend John Aubrey, was the freethinker, and far from respectable, Charles Blount, whose letter is display of learning which – as Blount’s work often does – turns out to have been plagiarised, on this occasion from a manuscript by Henry Stubbe. When they did ...”

“... mother a social worker and teacher of philosophy. He went to Harvard, where he shared rooms with John Updike and married the daughter of the Harvard historian Henry Steele Commager. He never taught at smart places, however: he taught history at the University of Iowa, then at Northwestern University, and for the last two decades of his life at the University ...”