“... spoke).Sometimes the index could be a powerful epistemic tool. For ten months of 1601 and 1602, Joseph Scaliger put his own work aside to assemble 24 indexes to the enormous corpus of Greek and Latin inscriptions that his correspondent Janus Gruter’s publisher was putting through the press in Heidelberg. He didn’t want to do it. In fact, he claimed, his ...”

“... In it, he argued that the greatest piece of French Revolutionary writing – Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès’s incendiary What Is the Third Estate? (1789) – reflected broad changes in 18th-century French society, which increasingly used the tools of political economy to understand itself and had begun to link political rights to economic ...”

“... myth. Everett shares his taste for marrying comedy and philosophy with Thomas Pynchon and the Joseph Heller of Catch-22 and Good as Gold. But there’s only one writer who resembles him in any significant way. Like Everett, J.M. Coetzee was a student of logic who turned to fiction. ‘My name is Eugene Dawn,’ the narrator of his early story ‘The ...”

“... kept under lock and key. So were the statements of the three friends she denounced as terrorists, Joseph Mooney, Brendan Magill and Alexander Rowntree. In long interviews, all three men had convinced the police that they had no connection at all with any terrorist organisation or any bombing. Yet at the trial their Irish names were left dangling in the ...”

“... startling to someone used to – say – Marxist criticism, or to the work of art historians like Michael Baxandall and Frances Yates. The emphases and conclusions differ – as they do between the essayists here – but the principle of balancing evidence intrinsic to the painting against material that lies outside the frame to make a critical account is the ...”

“... they could. In any case, he argues, Mrs Thatcher’s Wets were less silent than she and Sir Keith Joseph had been in the Heath Cabinet, and far noisier than the prudent men who staffed her later Cabinets. It is an honourable account but it leaves out what I thought at the time (perhaps wrongly) was the Wets’ real weakness: they had no political base in the ...”

“... I told one of my Transport House contacts that perhaps the Prime Minister should be warned that Joseph Kagan, the Gannex millionaire (later ennobled by Wilson and now wanted by the police), was behaving in ways which might embarrass or damage him. I heard nothing more about the matter, although I suspected subsequently that if anybody had scored a black ...”

“... the idea of a slow unfolding from the incarnation as a moment in history was giving way to what Michael Hall in his 2014 study of the architect G.F. Bodley called a belief in its ‘eternal nature’ outside time. It was a shift of understanding that found expression in art and in architecture, but Ashton doesn’t discuss it. Beyond a few references to ...”

“... Ponting first came to notice as a fearless whistleblower in the Ministry of Defence who exposed Michael Heseltine’s dodgy behaviour during the inquiry into the sinking of the Belgrano. As a historian he has made effective use of this reputation as the man they dare not gag. His writings tend to present themselves as ‘revisionist’ (his book on ...”

“... century has Staphylococcus aureus, as MRSA, attracted much attention from British politicians. Michael Howard’s mother-in-law died from a hospital infection and he made its control an issue in the 2005 general election campaign. Risk theorists say that top-level support for safety spending is much greater for air travel than for oil refineries because ...”

“... invaluable. In the course of their marriage she had serious love affairs with other men, including Michael Oakeshott and Isaiah Berlin. She was attracted by brains, and that is what drew her to Hart. His attraction to her seems very natural: her outrageousness and lack of inhibition must have made him feel alive. She despised ...”

“... up the slopes towards the French positions. In his classic account of the war, the historian Michael Howard described what happened next:The field officers on their horses were the first casualties. The men on foot struggled forward against the chassepot fire as if into a hailstorm, shoulders hunched, heads bowed, directed only by the shouts of their ...”

“... more recently to find Isaiah Berlin lumping Burke in with ‘reactionary thinkers’ such as Joseph de Maistre. Berlin’s friend Stuart Hampshire is contemptuous not simply of Burke’s views but of the quality of his thought: Burke’s rhetoric was mere assertion. It was not proof or even argument. He was not clear and he was not consistent. He saw ...”

“... in Media movement: among AIM’s patrons were William Simon, the former Treasury Secretary, Joseph Coors, the beer magnate and Reagan confidant, Claire Booth Luce, Jimmy Goldsmith and Richard Mellon-Scaife. Moon now felt confident enough to take on the hated New York Times by launching the New York News World and, in 1982, to take similar aim at the ...”

“... detail, the fairies, along with the other inhabitants of Fairyland – in the mid-19th century Michael Aislabie Denham listed more than 150 species, ‘hobbits’ included – gave the medieval Church more of a headache than has been admitted. The main problem, we might say nowadays, was that they were ‘inadequately theorised’. What were fairies? Where ...”