“... According to Henry James, reviewing John Cross’s life of George Eliot, the creations which brought her renown were of the incalculable kind, shaped themselves in mystery, in some intellectual back-shop or secret crucible, and were as little as possible implied in the aspect of her life. There is nothing more singular or striking in Mr Cross’s volumes than the absence of any indication, up to the time the Scenes of Clerical Life were published, that Miss Evans was a likely person to have written them; unless it be the absence of any indication, after they were published, that the deeply studious, concentrated, home-keeping Mrs Lewes was a likely person to have produced their successors ...”

“... doubts. In 1894 the rescued document created much excitement, not least because it seemed to show Joseph as the natural father of Jesus. Agnes tried to explain this away, but was not too embarrassed; like her sister, Maggie Gibson, she was enjoying her new-found fame in a man’s world. Speaking as a true scholar, she said: ‘Isn’t it fun when you can ...”

“... Few eyes could be seen to ‘light up at the sight of her’ on a Thursday morning, as Keith Joseph said his did – ‘while she’s hitting me about the head’, he added. She never relied on Cabinets again. (Then and since, she has suffered more defeats in Cabinet than any of her post-war predecessors.) By the autumn of 1981, she was also trailing ...”

“... able legally to control her own money (which the Littlewoods managed), she sold the film rights to John Osborne and Tony Richardson’s production company for the very substantial sum of £20,000 (the equivalent of around half a million pounds today).In September 1960 Richardson directed a production of A Taste of Honey in Los Angeles; in October it ...”

“... like the Loshes who took ideas seriously and were inclined towards radicalism. Sarah’s father John, born in 1757, was the eldest of four remarkable brothers. Their wealth came partly from land and later from the alkali works the family developed at the Walker colliery. The extended network of cousins and relatives by marriage (a number of whom were the ...”

“... above all by the medieval poet Hafiz, who had recently been translated by the Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. Hafiz, who lived in Shiraz, survived the turmoil that resulted from Tamburlane’s invasion, and wrote passionate poetry about drinking and loving well into his later years; he died aged around 70 c.1389. Hailed as a Sufi mystic as ...”

“... Crane, up through Thomas Wolfe, and on to anyone you care to name, sliding to an elegant halt with Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland. Largely it’s the names, not the work. You almost get the impression that Arthur Miller might have written After the Fall there, but it was mostly done in Connecticut; or that Kerouac might have written On the Road ...”

“... politics, war, trade and diplomacy. A manuscript newsletter could be personalised (subscribers to Joseph Mede’s service in 1620s England got their own covering message to accompany their package of news) or they could contain privileged information, like the handwritten updates on parliamentary proceedings paid for by English subscribers throughout the 17th ...”

“... demands, each subject to the law of diminishing returns. ‘Progress’ has its costs. Yet, as John Komlos argues in his subtle ‘anthropometric’ account of economic development in the 18th-century Habsburg Empire, the real point about the history of the West over the last couple of centuries is that Malthusian crises have been held at bay, perhaps ...”

“... in a solid black square and flourished it around the classroom as Negroes in a Cellar at Midnight. John Welch-man is fatally drawn to Allais’s parodies. He knows that he shouldn’t claim that his exhibited coloured rectangles were miraculous precursors of high abstraction, but he can’t entirely resist it. Of Allais’s 1897 sequence of single-colour ...”

“... others only to learn.’ He does not take the analogy further, but it is worth remembering that John Stuart Mill, precociously crammed with learning which he had to dispense to his brothers, achieved philosophy and personal maturity only at the cost of successive mental breakdowns. John Mill’s progression from the ...”

“... reached a decision that President Andrew Jackson disliked, Jackson is said to have remarked: ‘John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.’) If the court’s decisions are not seen as legitimate, its power could fade.Stephen Breyer, a Supreme Court justice since 1994, is concerned that this power is under threat. In his new book, The ...”

“... of the Bible Belt, a movement whose votes every Republican president since Reagan has depended on. John McCain is the party’s first presidential candidate in forty years who hasn’t secured the evangelical vote. H.L. Hunt, according to one of his enemies, ‘would be the most dangerous man in America if he wasn’t such a damn hick’. Hick or not, he was ...”

“... the visitor. Lockwood petitions meekly for a cup of tea. Then things start to move quickly. Joseph, the servant, conducts him to an upstairs room, where he’s soon fast asleep, primed for nightmare. We never do find out what happened to the cup of tea. Before long, Heathcliff, shaken out of an uneasy rest by Lockwood’s terror, has attempted to hurl ...”

“... biography, published a decade ago, Thomas Corns and Gordon Campbell argued that the young John Milton was not, as he has often been portrayed, a born radical. Instead, they argued, before 1637 the young Milton was politically and religiously conservative, a member of the Church of England who supported the High Church reforms carried out by William ...”