“... 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 ...”

“... encounter with the Demoiselles because the painting figures so prominently in the second volume of John Richardson’s magisterial Life of Picasso, whose first chapter, and part of the second, are devoted to its genesis, sources, formal innovations and iconography, and the ways in which Picasso’s experiences at the time he was painting it affected its final ...”

“... be secure, he believed, so long as the Netherlands were controlled by the republican party of John de Witt, which was aiding and comforting the Puritan opposition in England. The war of 1665-7 ended in insult to the English, when the Dutch were allowed to sail up the Medway and burn ships docked at Chatham. Had the war been essentially economic, Pincus ...”

“... society that George Tomlinson (a future Bishop of Gibraltar) and II of his friends at St John’s College, Cambridge founded in 1820 – occupies a distinctive niche in British social mythology. Or, rather, it occupies several niches, according to the taste of the mythologiser. In the eyes of many of its members, looking back in later years on the ...”

“... and passionate admirer of Cézanne, Braque and Picasso, he was a very knowledgable collector and took few duties more seriously than his trusteeship of the National Gallery. He was equally passionate about literature, and could quote Shakespeare at enormous length. He was an enlightened president and governor of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre over many years ...”

“... We think now of Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone, but the pattern can be traced back to King John, when London sneaked its own municipal charter under the lee of the barons, and even before. From almost the start, the dominance of Roman London in the affairs of Britain was a surprise, and shakily defined. But the climax came in the 17th century, in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the First World War moved the centre of political gravity further towards Westminster. It took World War Two to finish off the municipal spirit. In its wake came state collectivism. The nationalisations of the Attlee Administration gravely worried the defenders of local government. ‘You have only to look around the world today to find that efforts ...”

“... and went, rightly, for astronomical fixes wherever possible. But even here error crept in. As John Noble Wilford reminds us, ‘even as late as 1740, it was estimated that not more than 116 places on earth had been correctly located by astronomical observation.’ When we also recall that Ptolemy had no method of accurate time-keeping, we can only marvel ...”

“... by Odinga, Musyoka and other leaders – was an orange. Having won the referendum, the opposition took the orange as its label. Since then, the grouping has split into two factions – Odinga’s ODM and Musyoka’s ODM-Kenya. In order to shore up parliamentary support after the referendum, Kibaki made an alliance with KANU and its unpopular but wealthy ...”

“... if we were some sort of archaeological dig’. All ambitious politicians primp in some fashion. John Edwards, one of Hillary’s rivals for the Democratic nomination, was recently in trouble for allegedly paying between $400 and $1000 for a haircut. As a woman, however, she faces more sustained and malicious pressure in regard to her appearance, a subject ...”

“... bits of ephemera were the first two issues of the Lost and Found Times, produced by the poet John M. Bennett and the painter D.C. Landies. Having sent some copies through the post as a ‘mail art stunt’, they developed the alternative (and cheaper) distribution method of putting flyers on cars in a shopping centre parking lot. Landies died in the late ...”

“... although he reportedly came top in the exam, he was not given a place. Returning as a don, Plumb took ‘assimilation to the point of parody’, binning his Leicester accent and collecting English silver, Sèvres porcelain and fancy cars in ‘hypertrophied emulation of the presumed values of the establishment’. This is a sad and unsettling portrait, but ...”

“... the freehold of Skyline Chambers. The plain low-ceilinged rooms are decorated with paintings he took from his flat, along with a metre-long model of the Titanic, a childhood obsession, but most of his belongings are still in Skyline. He can see it from his new balcony, a seven-storey block faced in timber and what looks like red brick but is, in ...”